Forum Discussion
UI / UX Design process for PowerBI
dbuchter Thank you so much for sharing this heads-up! I am wondering if you can expand on this comment;
"For the designers out there wondering about the design capabilites of Power BI, I can say from my two years of experience that it is limited! I've been working via trial-by-error and constantly run into design and interaction roadblocks."
What are examples of these roadblocks?
We design in Figma and I am trying to understand if my team can use Power BI and follow our existing design system guidelines (Material UI based).
Hi Walls99.
It has been 2 years since my forst post, so I will say that Microsoft has made some incremental improvements, but there will still be some barriers. I suggest digging into the tool and playing around. Some of you patters may be easy to replicate and some may require some alternative options. Last time I was in there (I support a broader slice of the org than I did back then), which was months ago, there was still a limited selection of typefaces. I think we looked into webfonts a while back and couldn't get that to work. The repitoire of basic design tools is there, but any sort of custom shape is not. The grid is still tricky and designing for mobile gets even more dicey for layout. "Layers" are there, but they are clunky. Generally we have been able to fake a lot of things to make them conform to our patterns, but it requires some creative thinking and plenty of googling. Your designers will end up gaining knowlege of how to minpulate data, which I think is a bonus.
Thank you for your reply. We aren't using it yet but I've seen some demos. To me, it seems like the design could get close enough to our design system, but probably not perfect with the design tools as they are offered. Do your designers do all of their design in this tool or do they start in a different digital tool to mock up and then finalize in BI?
Hi Walls,
I have been working on Power BI for 3 years now. Though there are some improvements to the basic design tools of Power BI, they are still very limited and pretty basic. Like dbuchter mentioned, I too use layering technique and use some tweaks and hacks to get the look and feel desired in the report, but it will be just limited to the web version of the report. Layering definitely won't work for mobile version of the report and on the Power BI dashboards too. That is a big road block. Also, with layering and tweaks, the basic feature like showing tooltips in web version too gets impacted. The ability of having interaction between different visuals which are in the same page, by clicking on them also gets compromised to a certain extent depending on the design. Sometimes we just have to depend on the filtering pane. I can list out some more when I start making the reports but those are my immediate thoughts. Hope it helps.
Cheers,
Hi! Thank you for your reply.
Seems like a lot of these visuals come pretty pre-packaged. Do you think adding layers and over-customizing could be avoided? If I kept tool tips out and made only basic changes (placement, padding, color, corner radius, text) to meet some feel of consistancy do you think that could keep the mobile views and interactions clean?Hi Walls99,
The UX/UI designers that I work with use Adobe XD and sometimes InVision to generate the prototypes. But in most cases, I couldn't replicate their designs 100% in Power BI because of the limited designing options it has. I try to get the visuals close enough to match the design.
It is always good to avoid layers in Power BI as they limit the interactions. As long as we use the pre-packaged options available within Power BI and play around the visual properties that are available, it would be good. I haven't seen any issues in either mobile or web versions so far when I tried tweaking the visual properties to get the desired result.
Cheers,
