From the course: Power BI Data Dashboards

Building the Power BI ecosystem - Power BI Tutorial

From the course: Power BI Data Dashboards

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Building the Power BI ecosystem

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- [Instructor] This is what we'll be creating, a summary of the U.S. population trends across counties, metropolitan areas, and states over the last 50 years. These views in Power BI are technically reports, but I refer to them in this course as dashboards because we want them to be interactive. The focus of this course is on the concept of dashboard design. Good design isn't an accident. It's a strategically planned approach that requires implementing best design practices. We make decisions such as how to set up relationships between visuals, best calculations to use, deciding what visual best communicates the results, formatting decisions such as color and font, and giving the user interactivity over the dashboard. Let's say you got a dresser in a flat pack to assemble yourself when you get home. Putting it together gives you a great sense of accomplishment and ownership of this product, and it's a lot of work to assemble furniture. However, most of the work measuring, cutting, and testing was done behind the scenes before you even picked up the flat pack. That's like building dashboards. The end users should feel ownership in the insights they derive, even if we're actually the ones putting it together. Simplicity can be a beautiful thing, and when you create a dashboard not only for yourself but more importantly, for other people, think about minimizing the number of visuals to three or perhaps four large charts and mindfully adding filters and totals to make it easier to navigate. Another important perspective to remember is that your dashboards are dynamic in many ways and the goals and end user interactions this year may change next year, and we want to show flexibility by giving ourselves room to update these dashboards. You'll see this process throughout the course. I even get really picky sometimes and move my visuals around a lot. At the end of the day, you want to put yourself in the shoes of the end user, make their job, whether it's analyzing results, monitoring trends or making decisions, your driving force. With that in mind, you'll already be on your way to creating an exciting, accessible and consumable dashboard.

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