Microsoft Power BI: Dashboard Redemption (Art of Design II)

In this lesson, we'll talk about some of the many ways that poor Power BI report design directly works against our goals as business intelligence developers.  We'll identify some of the things that separate really well-designed Power BI reports from bad and how poor Power BI report design impacts our users, our team, and our company.  We'll also talk about why bad Power BI report design happens in the first place and identify the things that are within our control to fix as BI developers and the things that we can't control so that we know where to focus our design improvement energy.

In this lesson, we'll talk about what good Power BI design means and what we're specifically talking about when we mention attractive Power BI tools.  We'll talk about some data visualization lessons from Edward R. Tufte, how good Power BI design adds value, the things that good Power BI report design can't do, and we'll map out the Sweatpants BI Framework of Great Business Intelligence Tool Design.

In this lesson, we'll cover seven core design mistakes that Power BI designers make that keep their reports from being attractive, well-organized, and impactful.  We'll walk through some examples of how these "design sins" ruin our Power BI reports and we'll lay the foundation for the rest of the course, how to identify these sins, and ultimately how to fix them in our pursuit of designing incredible BI tools.

Before we get started talking about the first Power BI Design Sin, let's quickly run through how we can group the seven design sins and discuss why we're going to cover them in the order that we're going to address them.

In this lesson, we're going to talk about one of the most powerful design resources we have at our disposal:  Color.  We'll also talk about how color is often among the most misused and poorly applied design elements in many novice Power BI tools.  We'll cover when you should apply color to create the maximum effect, when to use it to communicate vital business information, and when color goes so, so wrong.  We'll also talk about the sweet spot for the number of colors that you should choose and walk through an example of how more often than not using the bare minimum amount of color is far better than applying more of it.

In this lesson, we'll walk through the best color resource that you may never have heard of:  The color wheel.  We'll discuss how to interpret the color wheel, how to choose colors from the color wheel, which colors we perceive differently and why, and how to use this to our advantage in our BI report designs.  We'll also talk about the importance of knowing how to adjust colors by applying black, white, and gray to balance our colors and find the perfect blend for different reporting situations.

In this lesson, learn about the importance of contrast in design and color application and how to deploy it for maximum impact in Power BI.  We'll also identify and discuss the most important color in Power BI for beginners, talk about some of the many cultural considerations of color, and wrap up with a brief summary of all of these important color lessons.

Our next design sin is Clutter and, in this lesson, we'll discuss some important philosophies for eliminating clutter and how adopting a mindset of "clutter killing" could require us to change our own mentality about keeping our reporting clean and minimalist.  We'll consider what lessons an organizing extraordinaire like Marie Kondo might have for helping us consider what to keep and what to scrap in our Power BI report designs and  and we'll identify 10 important ways that clutter infiltrates our Power BI reports.

In our first set of Clutter Killers, we'll talk about our old friend Color and how it manifests as one of the first and most important sources of clutter we need to eliminate and then we'll focus on other cosmetic/visual aspects of design clutter, including text, fonts, and thematic branding elements.

In our next set of Clutter Killers, we'll focus on the organizational aspects of our Power BI design work that can create or exacerbate unnecessary modes of clutter, such as how spacing is used in our report, how we align the objects in our design, how we group objects and concepts, and all of these things work with and against each other to comprise the overall composition of our build.

Wrapping up our lesson on Clutter, we'll talk about some of the ways that clutter can even manifest in our data visuals and we'll identify some specific ways to eliminate clutter in the formatting options of our data visuals.  Finally, we'll also talk about some tips for editing and formatting Effects in our data visuals so that we can build compelling, sleek-looking data visuals that are clutter-free and ready to present to your company's leadership.

In our first Power BI Dashboard Redemption, we're going to walk through an example of an ugly Sales Dashboard that embodies some of the many Color and Clutter design sins that we just talked about.  In this video, I'm going to walk through some of the key things that we should notice about how color and clutter are ruining the presentation of this report before we set about fixing them.

In this video, we'll focus on eliminating a lot of the visual clutter in this report.  We're going to start by removing the background image (always a Sweatpants BI no-no) and then we're going to restrict all of the color in this report to just shades of gray while we organizing all of the items of information in the report.

Next, we're going to take our grayscale version of the Power BI report and we're going to ask ourselves where a little bit of color would help this design shine.  We're going to make special effort to restrict our user of color to just one or two colors.   Then we'll wrap up with some quick touch-ups.  In one hour, we will have transformed this report from a busy mess into something that we could feel confident putting in front of a CEO.

In this lesson on the importance of consistency in our Power BI reports, we're going to kick things off by revisiting the concept of Cognitive Load, a term that expresses how our brains respond to and process to new visual stimuli and information and the work involved.  We're going to talk about how the many design choices we make in developing Power BI reports often disrupts the very mental processes we should be trying to nurture and increases the mental effort required of our audience to consume the information our report present.  Consistency is the key to helping our users quickly grasp how to use the tools we build and get from Point A to Point B and Inconsistency is the sin that keeps our users guessing.

In this lesson, we'll run through four key areas where consistency is absolutely crucial for keeping your users' brains on task.  We'll talk about why it's so important to deliver a consistent navigation experience for our users,   identify lessons that we can take away from web design and e-commerce websites, in particular.  And we'll even talk about how trivial things like the placement of icons and menus can throw off our users if we don't execute them precisely and consistently.

In this lesson, learn about a game-changing visual concept called Visual Encoding that further describes the massive negative impact that inconsistency in our Power BI tools can have on the overall user experience of our reports.  Learn about the cognitive impacts that describe how visual encoding works, what it means for data visualization and presentation, why our brains can't help but find patterns in the little details that, as designers, we may not even think about.  We'll also quickly touch upon another important cognitive design concept:  Gestalt design theory.

And as we wrap up our discussion on the Inconsistency sin, let's talk about why context is everything when it comes to designing impactful data visuals.  We'll touch upon some simple techniques for designing more context-driven and insightful charts and we'll wrap things up with a brief summary that explains why, while consistency may require a little extra effort on the part of the developer, the results are worth that extra time and investment.

In our next Dashboard Redemption, we'll transform a real estate market report from a colorful monstrosity into a two-tone dark-theme report that uses a variety of design tricks to create a showstopper.  We'll focus on key design topics like color choice, clutter, and inconsistency in design and talk through solutions for reworking some of the most problematic design issues in our report.

As we prep our canvas, we'll focus on a variety of techniques for better organizing all of the ideas at play in our report and we'll outline how to balance contrast and eye-catching colors with a dark theme Power BI report.  Remember, contrast is king... especially when building dark-theme business intelligence tools.  And in this video, you'll get to see contrast applied where it counts.

As we wrap up our real estate insights redemption, we'll create our first slicer menu and build in some other techniques to wrap up our showstopper with tons of design tricks that completely streamline and visually focus our Power BI report.

One of the most incredible things about working in Power BI design is that there are endless choices we can make as designers to present the data and information in our report but those endless possibilities are also one of the most terrifying things about design.  Our next design sin is buried in the choices that we make as Power BI designers.  The little details that we make when we choose our data visuals, how to format them, and how to label them can also make or break our Power BI report designs.  In this lesson, we're going to talk about some of the most crucial data viz choices to make, starting with a quick recap of data visualization 101 to make sure that we're always picking the right data visual for some of the most common reporting scenarios.

Designing impactful Power BI tools isn't just about picking the right charts, however; it's also about formatting them correctly and not falling into some specific data viz traps.  In this lesson, we'll walk through some of the most important traps you'll need to avoid when designing data visuals, why pie charts ruin everything, and why many, many BI developers use tree maps wrong.  And, of course, if you're considering using a pie chart or tree map, we'll talk about how you should approach those two situations instead.

In this lesson, we'll talk about the fine art of formatting data visuals and outline some techniques for eliminating chart junk in order to present the greatest amount of insight with the minimal amount of "data ink".  Continuing the thread of how important it is to use color sparingly and prevent clutter in our designs, we'll talk about how to make smarter design choices when visualizing data, how to find the story in a data visual, how to label visuals for maximum readability, and run through some last-minute touchups that can take your design choices from meh to marvelous!

Nothing sinks a Power BI report faster than not having a clear focus.  This massive design sin is something that we all have to battle with every time we sit down to develop a new tool because if we're not clear on which insights are most important to calculate and visualize and WHY those insights matter to the business, we run the risk of building the right tool for the wrong audience or the wrong tool for the right audience.  Focus helps us align our design choices to the needs of the people who will user our reports and this requires us to shift our mindset from BI developers to BI journalists.

If DAX and Power Query are concepts under the "Intelligence" umbrella of Business Intelligence, everything in this lesson is focused on what's under the "Business" umbrella.  Thinking like a BI Journalist requires us to step away from our computers and close out of Power BI desktop so that we can articulate what we're building and why we're building it without worrying about a single line of code.  In this lesson, we're going to outline some tips for asking the right questions, getting to the root of the story, developing good listening habits, and thinking about some of the business personas you will work with and develop alongside.

Once you've asked the right questions to understand the business problem and you've started building your Power BI report, you're going to need to know how to organize your insights into something useful.  In this lesson, we'll talk about how to organize your Power BI reports to present your most important information, what the hierarchy of insights means for the layout of your report, and revisit some important considerations for your data visuals as you transition from just visualizing data to visualizing insights.

In our next Dashboard Redemption, we'll look at a Power BI report that tries to cram too many topics and data visuals into a very compact space, resulting in squished and difficult-to-read charts that don't focus on anything important.  We'll cover some of the core design issues that are keeping the report from being successful before we talk about how to untangle them and build something really cool.

In this video, we'll crack open some DAX and use measures to find more interesting insights in our three primary HR measures, performing some basic year-over-year calculations.  We'll also start to outline our layout and use field parameters to streamline the presentation of our report and give our users the flexibility they need to explore the datapoints that are important to them without adding unnecessary clutter to the report that drowns our insights with clutter.

As we close out our third Dashboard Redemption, we'll build another interactive slicer menu to help engage our users with the data and we'll design another winning layout the helps our users quickly sort through our 3 HR metrics, understand important trends and performance benchmarks, and confirm the definition of the measures they're evaluating so that they know exactly where to address emerging retention/turnover problems around the company.