How To Avoid Common Power BI Report Design Mistakes

Power BI reports should make data exploration faster and more efficient, but design mistakes can hinder this goal. Here are five common mistakes to avoid when creating Power BI reports.

Mistake #1: Report Not Meeting User Needs

Power BI reports are usually created by people with a strong background in data analytics. After immersing yourself in this field for a while, you will inevitably start viewing data in a way that most people don’t. As a result, there will be data that may seem crystal clear to you, a data expert, but will not make any sense to your colleagues with backgrounds in management, law, marketing etc.

That’s why it’s important to approach Power BI report design from the perspective of your user. Before designing each report, ask yourself:

• Who is the user, and what is the main goal of this report?

• What data is the most important to them? What data will just introduce confusion?

• What visuals and other report elements will help them gain the most valuable insights?

• Can the user understand data with their current knowledge? If not, what can I do to help with that?

• How can I create a layout and navigation experience that’s familiar and intuitive to them?

Solution: Communicate with users. Talk to them before starting a new report and ask for feedback throughout the design process.

Mistake #2: Poor Report Aesthetics

What do all great Power BI reports have in common? They look good. There are three reasons why good Power BI graphic design should be your top priority.

1. First Impressions Count: A visually appealing report captures attention and encourages users to explore data. Studies show people form opinions in just 50ms (Lindgaard, Fernandes, & Dudek, 2006).

2. Brand Alignment: Incorporating your company’s fonts and colors enhances professionalism and boosts brand recognition among internal teams and external stakeholders.

3. Usability and Readability: Good design ensures reports are easy to navigate and understand.

Here are some of the mistakes that we’ve seen in many bad examples of dashboard design:

• Clashing colors: Create a poor first impression.

• Inappropriate fonts: Reduce readability and professionalism.

• Low contrast: Impacts readability.

• Overcrowded visuals: Makes it hard to focus.

• Misfitting visuals: Leads to misinterpretation.

• Overdesign: Distracts from content.

The Solution: Follow good design principles.

Aesthetics are a crucial part of Power BI report design and shouldn’t be an afterthought. Visual design deserves attention during both planning and creation. Here are some essential tips:

• Build a consistent, visually pleasing color palette to aid readability.

• Choose visuals that suit your data type.

• Remove elements that don’t enhance your storytelling.

• Use multiple pages for reports with a lot of data.

• Get feedback from colleagues before finalizing your report.

If your company has a brand design guidebook, start there for color ideas. If not, Coolors is a quick way to create an appealing palette. Keep in mind the meaning of colors: green often signifies positive results, while red highlights areas needing attention. Colors can also be brand or category-specific (e.g., green for eco-friendly solutions).

When used effectively, colors become a powerful storytelling tool. For guidance, check out our article, "Using Power BI Conditional Formatting in ZoomCharts Drill Down Visuals."

For example, conditional formatting can highlight values above a KPI threshold ($2.5M) in green and those below in red, offering quick insights into performance.

Before diving in, ensure Power BI and your visuals have the features you need. Drill Down Visuals include extensive customization options to enhance both the look and storytelling of your reports.

Mistake #3: Lacking Data Exploration Features

Power BI's strength lies in its interactive data exploration capabilities such as Filters, sorting, drill downs, drill throughs. Yet, some reports fail to fully utilize these features, turning them into static presentations rather than dynamic exploration tools.

Good Power BI report design examples will allow the user to explore data from multiple angles and easily find the data that they need. Let’s take a quarterly sales report as an example. Sure, the user can already get insights on how well the company is doing in general, and how much the sales performance has changed over time.

However, if your data model has a solid hierarchy and the report features drill down interactions, the user will be able to delve deeper and analyze data about particular product categories or brands. It’s an intuitive and simple interaction that can provide lots of value to the user.

At the same time, overloading reports with too many controls can hinder usability and performance. The key is striking a balance: include only the features that maintain the logical storytelling.

Solution: Drill-down focused design

Drill downs are one of the most important interactions for data exploration, because they directly expand on data that the user is interested in. It’s a simple and intuitive way for the user to interact with the data and gain more insight.

Learn more about setting up and implementing drill downs in our article "Power BI Drill Down: The Ultimate Guide"

There are two things you need to do if you want to bring more focus to the drill down functionality within your report. Firstly, your data model should contain hierarchies or relationships.

After that, you should start planning how the user is going to use these drill down capabilities.

In this example, we can see how users can drill down to deeper levels within a column chart with on-chart interactions. Thanks to cross-chart filtering, the donut chart automatically adjusts the view to show relevant data.

The Solution: Create the Power BI reports which are designed ground-up to provide the best drill down experience to the user – then you will need to use custom visuals that are specifically created for this task. Drill Down Visuals are designed to make deep data exploration easy for anyone.

Mistake #4: No Interactivity

Most people are already used to the sleek and intuitive user interfaces in modern consumer devices and apps. For example, the weather app on their smartphone shows a weekly overview, and if they want to see the forecast for a specific day, they just tap on it.

They didn’t even think about whether it would work, because it’s a logical assumption that it should. So, when the users transfer the same expectations to your Power BI reports, they’re going to click or tap on any UI element that they think should  be interactive. For example, pie charts essentially invite users to click on each slice , and columns on a combo chart attract mouse cursors like a magnet.

Unless the user is already used to the old ways of navigating Power BI reports – slicer menus, right click menus, toggles, etc. – they’re going to feel disappointed and frustrated when they click on charts and they don’t behave as expected.

Solution: Intuitive UX

Before you start creating your Power BI reports, carefully plan out the entire user experience. You can do this even with pen and paper! Think about the most important things in your report, and lay down all the ways your users can access them. For the most used filtering states, report pages or other interactions, you can create bookmarks and place a simple button that activates them.

While slicer menus and other off-chart controls are very useful to provide the user with a wide range of data exploration features, they shouldn’t be the main or only navigation controls. Instead, you should place the most used interactions (such as drill downs or filtering) directly on the chart so they are simple and intuitive.

Read more about various filtering features and interactions in article "Filters in Power BI: All You Need To Know"

Mistake #5: Limited Touch Support

It’s easy for a report designer to assume that reports will mostly be used on desktop PCs or laptops – after all, that’s what most employees have at the office. We’ve seen many bad dashboard examples and reports that are exclusively optimized for PC, with touch support being completely neglected or added just as an afterthought. Some of the biggest pitfalls include:

• Small and dense visuals, labels, legends, and other elements. They may look fine on a 23” monitor, but they will turn into unreadable gibberish on a 10” tablet.

• Tiny buttons and other controls that require sniper-like precision with fingers.

• No support for touch gestures such as swipes, pinch-to-zoom and others.

Here’s why desktop-first is a dated way of thinking. According to research by IDC, 60% of total US workforce will use mobile devices for their work by 2024. Furthermore, 75% of people believe that smartphones help them become more productive (Google, 2017). It’s clear – mobile support is not a courtesy anymore. It’s a necessity, and you should keep the best mobile dashboard design practices in mind when designing your report.

Solution: Design for All Devices

Thankfully, you don’t have to choose between focusing on desktop or mobile when designing Power BI reports. By following certain report design principles, you can make sure that your users can explore data anywhere, whether they’re using desktops, laptops, tablets, presentation screens or embedded systems.

• Use screen-space effectively with visuals that have rich drill down and filtering capabilities.

• Choose visuals that support mouse/keyboard and multi-touch gestures at the same time.

• Implement touch-friendly and intuitive on-chart interactions.

As you can see, the first and most important step towards touch-supported Power BI report design is your choice of visuals. That’s why we developed our Drill Down Visuals with a focus on equally great user experience on mobile devices and desktop alike. Try them out and feel the difference!