Power BI Design Standards

Consistent report design improves the end user experience and increases engagement

The Power BI Design Standards gives every analyst in your organisation a template and methodology to follow so that every report follows a consistent high quality approach.

End user experience

Fundamentally, the objective of producing a report is to deliver effective reporting to the end user. To do that, the end user experience must take many factors into consideration.

The content of the report or dashboard is core to its success, choosing the right measures and the right chart types are the building block of a good quality report.

The next step is to layout chart objects in the best way to make the end user experience as effective as possible.

An effective experience allows the user to get the information required as quickly and accurately as possible.

A report that is not designed following best practice methodologies can confuse and frustrate an end user, and eventually lead to report fatigue and ultimately a report that may not get used.

Best Practice

A well-designed report considers the narrative of the information on the page, from most important to least, in a hierarchical layout, both on a page and between the pages.

This hierarchy forms the fundamentals of the report layout.

The report will use charts and colours sparingly, so the colours draw the attention to the most important metrics on the page. Too many colours, used for the wrong reason, are one of the main reasons a report is difficult to consume.

Brand

End users like to feel the report they are consuming is familiar, using the business brand and brand colours has a positive psychological effect for end users to be confident in the data within the report.

Choosing the right chart type can be as simple as using horizontal bar charts instead of column charts depending on the content. Avoiding the wrong chart type supports the usability, accuracy, and efficiency of a report, so the end user can focus on getting information rather than working to understand the report.

Page Layout

Title

Typically, a person’s eyes will start at the top left of the page, this is the first opportunity we get to set the context of the information contained on the page. The page title describes the content of the page and sets the scene.

KPI’s After getting the context of information, our user will then naturally head down and to the right, in this case they are moving away from the filters down the left and onto the first KPI. Always place the most important KPI in the first spot then down in level as we move right. If the user wants to read more KPI’s they will naturally scan to the right.

Slicers

Slicers are placed down the left-hand side. This quickly becomes the periphery of the eyesight, so are not taking up key space, but are easy to access when filtering is required

Charts

The user will then return to the chart in the top left under the first KPI, then much like reading,, flow across then return and back down the left of the page.

Tables

If a table of data exists on the page, you should aim to have it last on the page. This level of data hierarchy is our lowest so should be either the only thing on the page, or limited to the last focal point in the bottom right-hand corner.

Logo

Where it is important to have your organisations logo included, we recommend it be in the top right-hand corner. This is a prominent location, however, is not in a prominent line of sight for a user that is there to do analysis in an efficient way.

Best Practice Methodologies

Report Governance Standards

To enhance the experience of the user, we have developed a badge system to identify the governance level of each report. This badge system consists of gold, silver and bronze badges that represent a different quality of report.

Gold: the highest quality with highly governed data sets. These are good for executive level decisions

Silver: the next level, mostly well governed datasets with some static datasets, e.g. excel files.

Bronze: ungoverned and should not be used for executive level decisions.

M.A.D. Framework

The MAD framework is a 3-level approach to report development, defined as MONITOR - ANALYSE - DETAIL that allows the end user to flow through data using a top-down approach as required.

Monitor

This is the 'Dashboard' part of the report. The dashboard should only be one or maybe two sheets of a larger application. Like the dashboard in your car, it's the area where we get the key pieces of information required to monitor the consistent running of the car. A business dashboard is no different. It should convey quickly snapshot of the required information to understand, at a high level, the status of the organisation.

Analyse

This level gives us the ability to dig a little deeper to understand an issue, when we look at activities we can compare Stores, SKUs, shifts etc to see how each of those are doing in comparison to each other or to a different period and we can start identifying specific areas where there are issues.

Detail

These sheets are typically a large table of transactional data that through the process of the Analysis level should have been filtered down to a quite specific set of data to investigate an issue.

Templates and Guides

Standards

To develop your new Power BI Standards, we take your organisations brand guidelines and incorporate them into our proven report and page layout methodology. This layout has been built over many years of implementation and refinement at organisations just like yours.

We then provide you with a series of templates and files to implement the design standards at your organisation.

Content

Power BI Template file with the new layout built in.
Design Standards guidebook that details all the standards and our recommendations for developing your new world class reporting suite
Badge files for report governance standards
Power BI theme file