Global Landslides Data using #PowerBI

This post is part of Power BI Portfolio series!

You can view Power BI report – Power BI Report URL or carry on reading to see my approach.

Recently I have read somewhere saying “These days users just want to scroll with any user interface”. It makes sense! If I give any device with a screen to my nine years old daughter, she expects it to have a touchscreen. In the same way, scrolling has become part of our everyday user experience. If we look at any mobile apps, most of them extend vertically, and without any scroll bar, we all knew that we have to scroll to see more content. Same for blogs, most of the blogs are going to infinite scroll (I am not a fan of endless scroll!).This works excellent for Apps and Web Pages; how about dashboard design?

With that thing in mind, I thought to design this report vertically. Stephen Few mentioned in one of his article “Don’t exceed the boundaries of a single screen“. For this report, I am going to ignore that rule and go beyond a single screen. But. Instead of going for a very long scroll, I went for recommended infographic size so that it’s not too beyond the single screen recommendation.

I am trying to show all the data on one page. Power BI latest and greatest feature Power BI ToolTips will be ideal to spice up this data story, but unfortunately, I can not use that feature with Publish To Web. Please vote here to get Tool Tips available for Publish to Web.

There are few things I did in this report.First of all Color Scheme. If you have seen any of my previous reports, you may have noticed I prefer to use blue. Blue is a universal colour, that’s why most notable brands use blue in their logo’s or apps like Twitter and Facebook.  I went for this colour not because it is universal, I wanted something to go well with my Dark Theme Map.

Next, I went for a slicer to select the sparklines. I achieved this by using a calculated table. I will write a blog post about this approach.

Then comes Map. I adore all those data viz with data points looks like a little twinkle or amazing pictures with Light Bokeh. Well, I am not good at either of those but with an inspiration from David Eldersveld blog I tried firefly look alike Map. Here is a blog from David showing his approach – https://dataveld.com/2018/03/15/firefly-cartography-power-bi/. I am quite impressed with the result. It looks pretty 🙂 and it does show me where most of the landslides were happening. I added a slicer on top of the map so users can choose the time frame. I chose slicer to work for Map only hence I differentiated it with a lighter shade background for sparkline.

Next, the Table, if anyone asks me what is your favourite visual is I would say Table. Whatever visual you have when you want to show figures, Table is the visual we need. So in the overall approach, I kind of carried high-level picture at the top then, looked at last ten years data. Then showed how it looks on Map then a table with data bars to explain the difference.

Let me know what you think, would you prefer standard report size or a scrollable report? This blog series focus is to learn so your input matters a lot. Please leave your feedback in comments!

You can download the PBIX here – https://1drv.ms/u/s!Avm7gbgZtlMlvxUgSojfIWSN8JQx

Prathy 🙂