AlongTheseLines's avatar
AlongTheseLines
Advocate III
11 years ago
Status:
Needs Votes

Design Best Practices Analyzer

A great design tool is still only as good as the designer. Fortunately the industry has well established design best practices for charts/reports/dashboards (e.g. Stephen Few, Edward Tufte). A Design Best Practices Analyzer could examine a design recommend changes to improve its utility and readability. For example: are colors used to represent categories consistently across charts? Are grid lines used to support value comparison? Is the use of ineffective visualizations (e.g. pie charts) minimized. Are quantitative scales present for appropriate axes? Do scales start at zero for bar charts? etc.

2 Comments

  • Also Power BI defaults could be better in some cases. E.g:


    • Y axis default to 0 for line charts
    • Bar chart as standard for categorical data (rather than column) as this keeps the text horizontal and less space is needed
    • Eliminate unnecessary non-data ink - this is particularly a problem in the packaged themes with tables and matrices
    • Give us a better gauge :-) This half circle is unnecessary and annoying - I just want to flatten it!


    And more...

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