5 Design Mistakes to Avoid in Power BI

small changes can have a big impact and that is also the case for the front end design of your powerbi reports now in this video I'm going to look at five design mistakes that you want to avoid coming up with a good design for your powerbi reports can be quite challenging and sometimes takes a lot of time however there are often these quick wins that you can Implement straight away that have a huge impact on the overall look and feel of your powerbi report now at the same time there are also things that you want to avoid now and that is exactly what we are going to f focus on now to Showcase these points I have here a typical powerbi report page as you see them flying by on social media and actually it doesn't look that bad but I do think there are few things that we can change to make this report design much much better now maybe you should pause the video right now have a look for yourself and see what five Improvement points you have and then compare against my five Improvement points all right now let's dive in now the first thing that I would change is the background for me it is a little bit too much now it definitely draws my attention which is a good thing however then it is a little bit too distracting and blows my mind not in a good way now this is especially overwhelming when you also have transparency applied to the backgrounds of your chart and when there are a lot of things going on in the backgrounds and you see for example here that line well intersects kind of the header of the slicer and it almost becomes unreadable so therefore not a good idea and what I would do is first just get rid of it all right so let's do that let's go over here to the page formatting settings and then canvas background there we have that background let's just remove it and I can breathe again now of course that background doesn't necessarily have to be white you could also make it gray but also this doesn't look amazing because when I remove that background I also removed the backgrounds of each visualization and that makes it now look a little bit messy so let's put in a different background now if you ask me this looks much better than what we had before we don't have all of these distracting background shapes and it's a little bit more toned down now if you disagree and think oh maybe it's still a little bit too much and just play around with the transparency so here in the canvas background there's also a transparency option and you can simply increase it to whatever you like okay so that is the first design mistake that I often see which is two distracting backgrounds so let's now go to number two and that is inconsistent spacing now this one always drives me nuts if I see inconsistent spacing between visualizations that is not there purposely so there's no intent behind the differences in spacing now that is exactly the problem that we have here on this report page now you see here at the top there's quite a lot of spacing compared to here and then here I believe it's again a little bit different so it was just put there more or less now to me this really looks like as if the powerbi report developer quickly put their visualizations in place that said oh looks good enough I move on to the next thing no really make sure that the spacing between the visualizations is consistent and if it's not then better make sure that there's a good idea why it's not consistent all right now another thing that bothers me is why is this not aligned now there's no real benefit of having that bottom right visualization being a little bit higher than the visualizations that are to the left of it now you might argue yeah but then I can see more items well in this case it's maybe one or two items more not such a big benefit but what is more important for me is that consistency that I would like to have in this report page because now you have these weird Corners there which is weirdly distracting so let's fix this so that was desire mistake number two inconsistent spacing and Alignment let's now go to desire mistake number three wrong use of fonts emphasizing the wrong things by how you use your fonts and also having weird proportions between your title chart titles and legends Etc now where does this report page go wrong now if we look here at the top of a report page and compare the values of a main Matrix that are visualized in the card visual as well as inside of the donut visualizations then you see there's a little bit of inconsistency it looks like here we have just the normal version of our fun type which is sigui UI and here there we have the light version so yes the font size is the same but the font weight is different and you probably want them to be the same if they all are visualizing the main kpi value now another thing that doesn't completely work here is the proportion of the font size for the value versus the font size of the label that we see with the kpi name now here we have for the value a font size of 46 and then for the label so let me select the card here we have a font size of 16 now I probably would make the value a little bit smaller and with that we also create a bit more wide space the wides space in every report is really important that makes sure that all of your charts and visualizations can breathe a little bit and that you can focus on the right things without feeling overwhelmed and without that feeling that you know everything is too cramped now that is one place where I probably would change the fonts another place where I would change it is over here now here I would like these values to stand out a little bit more so how can we achieve that by for example making the bolt or here the legend well the legend is as big as the title for that visualization which of course doesn't really make sense so that Legend probably needs to be smaller I guess it would also be a good idea to put it maybe in a top right corner so the placement is also off but when it comes to font size yeah it probably doesn't make sense to have for the legend a bigger phone size than for the title of the visualization so let's make some of these changes and that looks much better you see the proportions make sense again when you compare the values to the labels and also there the legend being a little bit smaller now also where do you put the emphasis so here by making the card values bolts it draws more attention to it without needing a bigger font right now the same over here with the values that are displayed here at the top with the percentages also there you see making a bolt draws a little bit more attention than what it was before all right so that was design mistake number three wrong use of fonts now let's go to design mistake number four now this one is simple two little padding now out of the box powerbi visualizations have quite little padding used to be zero I believe now it's a little bit more but still I would apply more it really makes a a big difference when your report page is done in the overall look and feel now why again has something to do with extra wides space let your visualizations breathe now you might object and say well if you create wide space you take space away from the visualizations and therefore the visualizations have to be smaller and everything will look and feel more cramped ah but that's not how design works you will see that if you have more space around the visualizations then the overall look and feel of your report page will be much better at the same time in some places you could also decrease the pading or decrease the space between elements to give more that feeling that these items belong together now here I probably would do that for the reference values below the card values that you see over there so by having them a little bit closer you create more that feeling that they belong together especially when you then also increase the outer spacing now let me Implement these changes and what do you think quite a big difference huh if you compare this what we have now with an increased out of betting of the visualizations to how it look like before all right now that is design mistake number four two little pting and white space and now it's time for design mistake number five and that is wrong usage of color or no clear intent of what a color means now here looking at this report you might at first side think oh everything looks nice and coherent what is the problem here then with color well there's actually one color only and that is purple and then we just have different shades of that color and that is basically the whole color palette now the positive side of this is that everything looks always nicely coherent now the downside here is first of all I think the colors are a little bit too muted but that's we could easily fix I think this looks much more interesting but I'm still not really happy and that is because a color doesn't have a clear and consistent meaning within this report page now what is the problem exactly now let's take as an example that line chart where we have the sales development over time broken down by different product categories now the product category technology has the color light orange now good then you continue reading your report you get over here to the bottom section where you see the sales breakdown by region and then we have that same color but now for the region Central so here it means product category technology here it means region Central so when I look at a report I always try to see what does a color mean and there are two options either a color is matched to a certain item or a color is assigned to a certain matric for example when you see the color blue that means sales when you see the color orange that means quantity now the problem here is that colors are used inconsistently now this is also visible here at the bottom between these two visualizations the bar chart and the scatter now here if I click on East I have this light pinkish color and then here on the right hand side well we have a dark purple color so let's also change the colors here and bet at first side a lot of you will say I like it better how it looked like before and I tend to agree with that however the use of color was inconsistent and therefore also very confusing now with design you have to strike a balance between how pretty something is versus the ux and how effective something is another thing that you have to keep in mind is the intensity differences between the colors that you're using in your visualizations now if you look at the example from before here you see that the intensity of the colors is almost the same and for readability especially for people that are color blind is important that you have different intensities of color now these are the five design mistakes that I commonly see when I look at other people's powerbi reports now let me know did you have the same ones and what common design mistakes do you often see in people's powerbi reports now let me know in the comment section below now if you want to learn how to build successful powerbi reports in a systematic way so that you can repeat it every single time then check out my upcoming design training over here and let's build some reports together from beginning to the end Oh and before I forget if you want to have the background from before you can download it using the link over here thank you for watching and see you in the next video

Channel: How to Power BI

Views: 57,612

Keywords: powerbi, power bi, howtopowerbi, how to power bi, data training, datatraining, bas dohmen, power bi training, power bi tutorial, power bi design, report development, hacks, tips, tricks, optimization, themes, templates, design assets, report design, design mistakes, best practices, padding, alignment, white space, background, color

Id: VvQVmxXT86s

Length: 11min 35sec (695 seconds)

Published: Mon Jan 29 2024