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Prathy Kamasani

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#POWERBI REPORTS LANDING PAGE TIPS AND TRICKS: Progressive disclosure design approach in Power BI using Card pattern

by Prathy Kamasani
written by Prathy Kamasani

What is Progressive Disclosure?

Progressive disclosure is an interaction design pattern that sequences information and actions across several screens (e.g., a step-by-step signup flow). The purpose is to lower the chances that users will feel overwhelmed by what they encounter. By disclosing information progressively, interaction designers reveal only the essentials, and help users manage the complexity of feature-rich websites or applications.

https://www.interaction-design.org/literature/topics/progressive-disclosure

When we hear UX terms like Progressive Disclosure, it feels like they are essential for Web design or App design. Well, they are vital for report and dashboard design, especially landing pages. In this post, let’s look at the Horizontal card pattern.

Using Horizontal Cards:

2020 04 29 16 58 15 1

In the above example, I used a pattern to show details using action from the Card. When a user clicks on a card, the report will show details related to Card. It sounds straightforward, but it involves a lot of work using Power BI Functionalities: Buttons, Bookmarks, Sections, Grouping and Page Size.

There are few aesthetics I paid attention in this Report Page which are key for any landing page. Usually, a Landing page helps users to navigate around the Power BI Model, so it is important to highlight those navigation steps. In the above model, I used Buttons, labels and Images for navigation hints.

Button:

I again used the Button Hover effect as I used in the previous post. Instead of using images, I used a very subtle hover over shadow kind of effect. To achieve this, I added an Outline to the Button with the following properties.

UntitledImage

Under Button, I added a shape with below properties.

UntitledImage

My shape size is slightly less than the button size. So when the user looks at it, Shape looks like a card; overplayed Button gives an action to show detail and also hover over effect to provide User Experience users.

Labels:

I added a text label with an image to hint users to click on cards.

UntitledImage

Images:

I added images to navigate back to the landing page. Also, to help users to highlight which detail window belongs to which category.

UntitledImage

Bars:

I also added lines under buttons to show which tab has been selected using shapes in Power BI.

UntitledImage

That’s all; I hope this inspires you to create some Power BI Awesomeness.

You can view Power BI report here – Link

Prathy 😊

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DataVizDesignPower BI

Power BI reports landing page tips and tricks: Tiles using, Images, Power BI buttons, hover effects and all the above 

by Prathy Kamasani
written by Prathy Kamasani

This is a blog post series to show various ways of creating parts of landing pages for better UX and navigation

Tiles using, Images, Power BI buttons, hover effects and all the above

Either it is Power BI report or some web page, tiles are one of the best-known ways to add the user experience to landing pages. When Tiles has images, dynamic content, actions, they get more practical plus engaging. Let’s look at some ways of creating tiles in Power BI

Approach 1

This is probably the most common approach. Import an image to Power BI Desktop, add an action to go to the bookmark, in this case, a detail page and add some text under the image. This text can be dynamic with DAX.

UntitledImage

Approach 2

We can extend the example by adding a button when the user hovers over the button, a text appears giving the context of the action or detail.

2020 04 22 22 44 27 1

This can be achieved by putting an empty button on top of the image. Then update the properties of button to show text only “On Hover”

Approach 3

In the above example text is static, but we can make it dynamic.

2020 04 22 22 53 29 1

This can be done by using the expression functionality of Button Text property of the button. That gives the functionality to show dynamic text.

Approach 4

Having images are likeable but too many are never right, that’s when instead of going for an image, we can just show Button with Text. But on hover over we can add more context, like below:

Here, I am just using a group of visuals and an image to show details. I added static text with a URL feel.

Approach 5

Another way is to show static or dynamic text in the button, but instead of showing over the image, actually show under the image as a description.

To achieve this result, we use same text properties as shown in the above approaches but instead of using top or middle vertical alignment, go for bottom vertical alignment. Also, make the blank button size bigger than the image size so the text shows right under the image on hover over.

More landing pages tips to follow, hoping these examples leaves you with some inspiration.

You can download the PBIX here and view here

Prathy 🙂

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Power BIQuick Tip

#PowerBI Auto Recovery

by Prathy Kamasani
written by Prathy Kamasani

A quick post, how many times in Power BI Desktop, have you clicked on “No, remove the files.” and then say OOPS! Well, I did plenty of times to discover this trick.

In short, you can find those removed files under Temp folder like many other windows application files. Usually, the location will be somewhere like this – C:UsersprathyAppDataLocalMicrosoftPowerBI DesktopTempSaves. This location depends upon which version of Power BI Desktop you have. Beware, these files will be removed whenever you clear your Temp Directory.

In long let’s see what happens with Power BI Desktop Auto Recovery and where we can find PBI related files. By default Power BI Desktop saves Auto recovery files; you can find Auto Recovery settings under Power BI Desktop options.

When a user creates or opens a Power BI Model, Power BI desktop saves a copy under Auto Recovery and Temp Saves. When the user closes without saving, Power BI Desktop will save an Auto Recovered Power BI file under the Auto Recovery file location given under Power BI Options. When you click on “No, remove files”, It will remove files from the Auto Recovery folder. But, files under Temp Saves are still there.

Remember, every time you open a recovered file or open a file from Temp Saves, Power BI Desktop will refresh all queries again. I think it’s for security purpose, not great when your queries take a long time to reload all the data but it’s better than losing all the hard work.

That’s all, Temp Saves; saved my life many times. Hope it helps someone out there too.

Stay Safe!

Prathy

 

 

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#LondonPUGDataViz

Jan 2020, London #PowerBI UG DataViz

by Prathy Kamasani
written by Prathy Kamasani

Hello all,

My 2019 was restless; hence my blog, London #PowerBI UG posts went almost quiet. Well, the good news is I have committed to trying to keep up to date. Even though the blog went quiet, we hosted some fantastic sessions at London Power BI user group, and we received an amazing response for Power BI UG DataViz as well. You can follow and register for future events on Meetup. Our next event is on Feb 18th, check it out here – https://www.meetup.com/London-PUG/events/267353778/ 

As many who follow us may already knew, our usual venue Skills matter went under administration but they announced they will be back in business in FEB 2020 – https://www.skillsmatter.com/. It’s a great news and can’t wait for videos to be available again 🙂 Meanwhile, we started experimenting with recording our videos. You can find our YouTube channel –http://tinyurl.com/puglondon 

So for January DataViz, we have given our attendees to play with Human Development Data – http://hdr.undp.org/en/data. This dataset was exciting but also challenging. However, we received two great submissions.

Chris Barber

Commercial Finance Manager at Targus. CIMA certified accountant (first time passes), recipient of IBM Academic Achievement Award received during MSc in Business Analytics (University of Warwick) & MCSA: BI Reporting certified. View Power BI report

TBC

TBC

Chris Barber

PBI Report – https://app.powerbi.com/view?r=eyJrIjoiM2FiMWMzMWQtOTRlYy00YjljLTg2NDMtOTJiMDU0OGEzNjNmIiwidCI6IjM4YmU3MjU5LTMyMGQtNDZkYy04YzNiLWNkZDA5OTM1NGExMyIsImMiOjh9

 

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Power BI

How I designed a layered donut chart

by Prathy Kamasani
written by Prathy Kamasani

This is a long overdue post, probably one of the most received questions on my blog was, How I designed a visual in one of my Power BI reports I published under my portfolio.  As I promised to many, let’s see how I did it. Sorry to spoil, but it is nothing but a layered Donut Chart, but how I approached to show values probably is a good one. Be aware; I created this report quite a long time ago, If I do it now, I probably would have taken a different approach or different visuals.

Here is the visual I am talking about:

NewImage

You can view the full report here – https://prathy.com/portfolio/school-uk/

The tricky bit of any good data visualisation is finding interesting data, inspiration and story. In my report, my story was to show the comparison of Ofsted school ratings among the total number of schools. I also wanted to carry my story between report pages with colours.

So in this particular visual, I wanted to make it visually appealing, so I decided to show two metrics on each donut visual, the measure I want and the total number of schools. Then I resized each visual in a way so that they look like one visual. Those days there were no grouping, but now we can group them as one visual too. Also, when I first designed this report, default Power BI donut chart didn’t have an option to resize the ring, so I went for Circular gauge by MAQ software. Now we can use the default Donut chart too.

However, due to the default responsive nature of Donut chart, we need to choose different inner radius value.

Next Labels:

As I decided to not show any labels of the rings for visual appeal, I added labels next to visual using bullet point kind of effect using the same colours I used on the visual. There are two ways you can achieve this:

By using shape visual:

Using shape visual is easy as we do all the development in one tool, but resizing to get the smallest shape is a bit tricky. That’s when using image is helpful.

By using an image:

Using an image is a tiny bit more work. But we have more options. I like using Flat Icon or PowerPoint. When you use image, you can go for various shapes and sizes.

That’s all, Nothing fancy excpet layering. I hope this helps. Let me know what you think.

Prathy

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DataViz

#DataLounge video with #AltiusData talking about Storytelling and #PowerBI

by Prathy Kamasani
written by Prathy Kamasani

A few weeks ago I got invited to the DataLounge YouTube series. I went on talking about my favorite topic Storytelling. It was a very interesting conversation with Alejandro Leguizamo and cool setup. Check it out :

As Power BI getting more popular and used by many organizations, we are in a state to thinking about Data modeling, visualizations and storytelling. In 2020, I am planning to do more blogs and training on this topic. For now, if you are interested, please check out my Precon at SQLSaturday Slovenia. Slovenia is a great place to escape in winter and SQLSaturday Slovenia is one of the best SQLSaturday – https://www.kompas-xnet.si/izobrazevanja/koledar-tecajev-t/SQL2019%20-%202 

Prathy 😊

 

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DesignPower BI

#PowerBI Card visual to show flags/warnings

by Prathy Kamasani
written by Prathy Kamasani

This is a long-overdue blog post. A couple of months ago, I worked with a client in Amsterdam; one of the use cases was to show key metrics, flags that need attention. The user also wanted to click on warning symbol to confirm, where the issues were, however, the user didn’t want a drill through, it has to be a left-click.

As of yet, except for button/action we can not do left clicks in Power BI. As the user didn’t want the report to open in another browser tab etc., so was thinking about other options and at the end decided to go for tooltips and symbols to show flags like below:

Power BI Visual with warnings

#PowerBI Card visual to show banners/warnings:

Card visual is my go-to visual when it comes to Key metrics with numbers. In this use case, the user wanted to see key metrics, warnings and the respective details of warnings.

Two things I considered while designing this:

  1. Highlight only the values that needed attention
  2. Keep the design and clicks simple

When it comes to flags, many times, I see people highlighting all values. In my opinion highlighting should add the benefit; it should not make the report or visual cluttered. So I try to focus on data that needs attention. If we look at the below screenshots, we can see the difference very well.

However, in my use case, I want to highlight only some data, but that may not be in your case, and you may want to highlight all warnings.

Next, fewer clicks or no clicks. In this use case, I needed a dynamic, data-driven display of details. Tooltips are perfect for this use case, and the user doesn’t have to do much other than hovering over the warning sign.

Design:

So first I created a DAX measure to show the symbols I wanted to show, something like this:

Warning2 =

VAR V =IF([% Change]=BLANK(),BLANK(),
IF([% Change]>0.1,"Great",
IF([% Change]>0.03&&[% Change]<0.10,"Good",
IF([% Change]<0.03,"Bad"))))
Return

IF(V=“Good",”★",”")

Once I have my measure ready, I created one Card to show my measure value and the other one to show the warning, like below:

2019 10 21 14 37 34

Then I used conditional formatting to make the colour of the symbol based on my measure

2019 10 21 14 41 03

The user was pretty pleased with the approach since then I used this kind of design at various places so thought to write a blog post to, hoping it will inspire someone out there. Key metrics are very important in the report design, keep an eye on my next blog post where I will be writing my approaches about “Visualising Key Metrics using Power BI”.

You can view the report here.

Prathy

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Power BI

Power BI visual header tooltip

by Prathy Kamasani
written by Prathy Kamasani

Like many things in Power BI, Power BI Tool Tips functionality evolved so much. I probably do a post on Tool Tips sometime soon. Today it’s about visual header tooltip. While I was working on a project recently, I came across a new ToolTip icon under visual headers. Since then, I have been using a lot, so I thought to blog about it.

Let’s start with what is Tool Tip:

A tooltip is a graphical user interface (GUI) element used in conjunction with the cursor or mouse pointer to display information about an item without needing to click on it. The typical scenario for summoning a tooltip is to hover the mouse cursor over another GUI element such as a tool icon in software application, and it is also prevalently used in websites.
A tooltip is also known as a hint, infotip or screentip.

I think in Power BI, visual header Tool Tip Icon works more like a hint, info tip or screen tip. You can enable this on each visual under Visual Header in Visual properties. This blog post explains how to enable it – https://powerbi.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/power-bi-desktop-june-2019-feature-summary/#headerTooltips

What I want to talk about is use cases:

  • Visual annotations
  • Business logic explanation / Calculations
  • How  to navigate around the visual
  • Show more data related to visual
  • Anything or everything else

Visual annotations: 

When we look at data journalism posts, most of the times they have annotations, explaining what visual showing or talking about measures. Again most of these data storeys are used for paper. But in the digital world, we do see these annotations more interactively. It is nice to have this kind of lil annotations for everyday reporting as well, and Tooltip Icon can be used for that purpose. Another thing is using canvas space wisely, it is important, and having this kind of hint helps us on saving the canvas space.

So following visual, I am using the ToolTip icon to do annotations. When the user clicks on the header tooltip icon, it will show annotations related to visual

Business logic  / Calculations explanation:

Another good use case is to explain business logic. In the BI world, everyone works towards a single version of the truth, but many times it’s illusory. Another silly thing is naming conventions, like Microsoft products, in the business as well one metric may mean different things in different teams. So having a bit of explanation about metric can be very very handy and Tooltip icon can be used for it.

In the following visual, I am showing how the total got calculated using the Tooltip icon.

How to navigate around the visual:

Not all visuals are as self-explanatory as helpful bar charts. Many need explanations, not only visuals but with all other extra features like drill down, drill through, Tooltips, etc benefits with a bit of guidance. Again, the ToolTip icon comes handy here.

In the below example, I am using the tooltip icon to show how to navigate around the visual

Show more data related to visual:

Simplicity is the key! When you want to focus on one thing, then showing only that helps. But I am sure there is always this one business user who wants to see that one other metric on the report page. 

For example, in the below visual, I want to highlight the trend lines, but the business user also wants to know the number of rows in Male and female. Then that could be something I can show using Tooltip icon

Or

Anything else you want to display 🙂

Hope you enjoyed reading; let me know how you are using this functionality…

Till next time,
Prathy 🙂

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POWER BI MOBILE REPORTING
Personal

Power BI Mobile Reporting

by Prathy Kamasani
written by Prathy Kamasani

Steadily more users are getting interested in Power BI mobile reports, especially when you design reports for executives; they are more interested in mobile view, of course, they do want to explore the detail data but not always.  Until recently, I was someone who doesn’t pay much attention to mobile reporting unless the user explicitly asks for one. So, when I don’t create a layout for mobile when the user opens the report using Mobile App, it automatically opens the report in landscape mode. Which is fine but it’s not designed for that purpose, it misses the sleek look.

Creating a mobile report is pretty easy in Power BI but creating a good one is not that easy. In this blog post, I want to show how I approach mobile reports in Power BI.

Few things to note before we look into mobile reports:

First of all how to design a mobile report; docs has an excellent explanation including considerations here – https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/power-bi/desktop-create-phone-report

then a few factors to highlight:

  • You can only use visible visuals which are available on a report page
  • Power BI background images won’t auto fit for mobile layout
  • You can not overlay visuals

By considering above let’s see how we can design a proper Power BI mobile report:

To start, I have a Power BI Model with the below report page. In this page, I used page backgrounds, default paper colour with a background image with a fit layout.

Users can view this report correctly in mobile in landscape mode. However; there is a lot of detail in this report, so I want to show only a few visuals in the mobile layout.

Few other things to consider, I am using a dark background, so as I blogged here – #POWERBI FOCUS MODE AND DARK BACKGROUND IMAGES, I am not able to see most of my visuals correctly in the focus mode or mobile view. Next, in my desktop layout, I am using a beautiful grid layout which makes my report look tidy. However, when it comes to mobile design, I am losing the grid layout.

So creating a report based on existing visuals is pretty straightforward. However, it feels not right. To make it beautiful, we need to find a few workarounds.

  • Background

I am a huge fan of background images but if you need to create mobile layouts then probably it’s good to not to use them if they are not working for mobile design. Instead, use visual backgrounds and Titles with backgrounds.

  • Separators

It always makes sense to separate the visuals, with a sensible gap or a line. I like to separate visuals with a thin line but while you are working with mobile reporting every bit of space is essential and probably, having dedicated space for a line is not great. Notably, the line takes like three cells. With the latest PBI desktop, we get a blank gap between each visual in Mobile Layout. But in the older versions, all visuals were attached. ( I don’t know since when we are getting this separator, but it’s excellent! It’s was not there before)

  • Visual Backgrounds

Visual backgrounds come handy when you don’t want to use separators. Having visuals with different background colour next to each kind of gets separated because of diverse backgrounds. But these won’t look great in the desktop/web view.

  • Visual Borders

One way we can get away with the same background which looks nice on both mobile and web layout is by using borders. We can use the border as background, so you don’t see the border in the desktop/web layout but will see them in the mobile report.

  • Overlay of visuals

Or another way is having two visuals of same overlayed one on the other. One to use in Mobile layout and others to use in desktop/web layout. This works significant but, it can impact on the performance. Remember the more visuals we have more time it takes to load the report. (Hopefully one day, I will blog about debugging a report). Overlaying visuals is excellent, but when it comes to slicers, they may not work exactly the way we want. But we can use Sync Slicers advanced options and get away with it as I blogged here – SYNC SLICERS & SYNC SLICERS ADVANCED OPTIONS

Lets’ see how we can use the above workarounds with our example.

For the same report page we saw earlier, I updated all backgrounds of the visuals to the same as a report background image I was using. Now the mobile layout looks a tiny bit better. As I mentioned earlier, with the latest release, we do get a nice gap between all visuals. So, now my mobile layout looks a lot better by just placing all visuals and titles, like below:

It already looks great, but if we want to make it better, we can try overlaying visuals.  For example, slicers; checkboxes are not significant to tap in the mobile screen. So, I can duplicate that slicer and change the orientation to horizontal, hide it behind the same slicer and put these two slicers in the same Sync slicers group like below. Now, in my mobile view, I can use a horizontal slicer, in web layout checkbox. Because they are in the same group, when the user changes the mobile orientation, visuals still make sense.

Next, the wide table, Instead of showing those many values, I want to show a few with multi-row card visual. Used the same method, created another visual with fewer attributes and hidden that under the table.

And now my mobile report looks a lot better and more readable. when I change the orientation, I can see detail view and in the mobile layout, I can see fewer rows.

In summary, don’t ignore mobile viewers while designing a report page. Few simple changes help to design excellent mobile reports. Hope it gave some inspiration.

Until next time,

Prathy 🙂

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DesignQuick Tip

#PowerBI Focus Mode and Dark Background Images

by Prathy Kamasani
written by Prathy Kamasani

A quick post today. I received an interesting question in a webinar I did recently for “Best of Power BI World Series”.  During the webinar, someone asked me “How to deal with a Table or a Matrix visual, when you have a dark background image, light font colour in Focus Mode?”.

So what exactly he/she meant?

As you see in the below video, when I go in focus mode, I can not see any values because my font colour and the background colour of Focus mode are white.

To overcome this, especially when you are using dark backgrounds, it is better to use the same colour as background as your visual background too, like below. That way when you go on focus mode, you will still see the font. I will be talking more about visual backgrounds in my next post, so stay tuned.

Whenever I work with font colours, I find ColorCombos website very useful. It has a Font Colour Test option, which comes very handy to choose right foreground and background colours.  –https://www.colorcombos.com/color-schemes/27/ColorCombo27.html

Keep smiling,

Prathy 🙂

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