Techniques to use when creating custom visuals in Power BI for an improved user experience:
1. Make it Simple and Focused on Your Visuals
Don't overbook your visuals. Instead, keep your most important information clear to help to communicate the bottom line. Use fewer elements, such as axes, data points, and labels, to avoid clutter.
2. Use types of visuals that are easy to read: choose bar charts or line charts when comparing and displaying trends.
Apply a theme to all the visuals (Color Scheme, Font Size, and Style). This will help maintain a seamless flow by eliminating visual noise.
Visual alignment and proper use of padding space will enhance the dashboard's professional appearance.
3. Conditional Formatting
Conditional formatting is to be applied to specific data points that are key, trending, or outliers. It draws the viewer's attention to appropriate metrics and easily delivers what needs to be identified.
Make the performance come alive with color gradients, icons, or data bars.
4. Interactivity
Add tooltips to give users more information without adding visual clutter. If a user would like more information regarding some data, they can simply point at the point.
Use drilling functionality so that the user can click on a particular data point and go to another report/page to see further analysis.
Add cross-filtering between visuals, which will enable the user to select data in one visual and automatically filter in others for a seamless dynamic experience.
5. Optimized for Performance
Optimize custom visualizations by minimizing data loads and not performing complex calculations directly in the visualization. Nonsmooth performance hurts the user experience.
Use the capabilities of Power BI's Aggregates and measures to smooth the visual's performance so that it renders instantly.
6. Responsive Design:
Ensure your custom visuals are responsive. This means that they must be displayed responsively, especially on smaller screens and when people display reports on their mobile devices in portrait orientation.
Test how the visuals will resize to ensure they are still readable and useful.
7. Contextualize Data with Titles and Descriptions
Add meaningful titles and descriptions to a visual so that exactly what it is and why becomes apparent without the need to guess.
Provide dynamic titles in customized visuals that update with filter or slicer selection to create a more personalized experience.
8. Accessibility Best Practices
Create accessible, customized visuals for everyone, including those with color blindness. Apply color palettes that are color-blind friendly and do not depend on color alone (icons or text) to convey information.
Consider including keyboard navigation and screen reader support in customized visuals to increase accessibility.
9. Provide User Guidance:
This can include guides on how to properly handle features such as the appearance of help icons or hover-over descriptions explaining the functionality of a custom visual. Such complex visuals might no longer be unmanageable.
Be sure that the meaning behind a color, a symbol, or an axis is defined with an included legend or key.
Thus, by focusing on simplicity, consistency, interactivity, and performance while trying to ensure accessibility and responsiveness, you can create your custom Power BI visuals to enhance the user experience.
