Did you know that one of the true measures of how good your report is is how fast people adopt your report? In this episode of data digest, we will be learning how to design an immersive experience for the user in Power BI

Requirements

For you to enjoy this session, it is expected that you have the following:

1. A laptop,
2. Power BI (installed), and
3. Microsoft PowerPoint.

What is meant by an immersive experience?

The word immersive means that you make someone feel wholly involved or engaged.

A report is said to be immersive if it makes the users feel involved and engaged such that they have a great experience when interacting with it. It ensures that the users’ expectations are met and also allows them to have control over how they interact with it.

For your report to be immersive, it has to be:

1. simple
2. easy to use
3. include a great user experience

You can as well watch the video tutorial here.

Instructor: Linson Abah (LinkedIn)

Why should your report be immersive?

It is important to discuss the benefits that an immersive report will bring to you. This will assist you in planning well for the report you will make any time you are about to. These benefits include:

1. It helps you achieve more recognition

Surely, people interpret faster what they see than what they read, especially when it is attractive. When people view your report and find it very worthwhile, your name will be one they will remember any time they are about to make any report. They will also refer to you any time they find it challenging to build an awesome report.

2. It makes you feel good about it

When you do something that people like, it also makes you feel good. You will be proud to be associated with excellence as a result of it.

3. It adds more value to you

It makes people recognize you as an intelligent and creative person. People you work with will also view you as an exceptional employee.

4. It increases your users’ trust

Usually, people trust things that look fine and captivating. It makes them believe more in the results being presented.

What makes your report immersive?

Let’s look at some of the ingredients that make an immersive report. Note that these ingredients if used wrongly can make a poor and overwhelming report for the user.

Layout

One first thing that catches the attention of someone is an impressive interface. This defines what your report will look like. When the layout of your report looks classy, the users will feel good interacting with it.

Most people don’t care about the layout of their report and just place anything anywhere mindless of how well to do it. This in turn results in a poor-looking report.

We will create a sample of a layout that can be adopted. This sample will house three different visuals.

To do this, we will be using Microsoft PowerPoint.

Note: This can also be done using other applications like Figma, AdobeXD, Mockflow etc.

1. Load Microsoft PowerPoint on your computer
2. Arrange the layout

• Navigate to the Insert Tab and select Shapes from the Illustrations wizard
• Under this, select the rectangle shape
• Drag your cursor to draw a rectangle on the slide page

• Select the rectangle shape again and drag the cursor on the slide to draw another rectangle

• Select a rectangle again from the Shapes and drag and draw a small rectangle on the top left-hand side of the page. This is meant for the organization’s logo if applicable

• Select a rectangle again from the Shapes and then drag and draw it on the page three times as shown below.

3. Format the background color

• Right-click on the white space,
• Select format background,
• Choose Solid fill, and
• Select the gray color (you can choose any color you prefer)

4. Adjusting the color of the layout

• Choose colors from a color palette
• Browse online for color hex codes (one of the sites you can visit is Color hunt )
• Generate colors from these sites.
• Copy the hex codes generated
• Click on any of the arranged rectangles
• Select Shape Fill from the Drawing wizard.
• Paste the hex code in the Hex space and click Ok.

• Repeat the same steps to adjust the colors of the other rectangles as you wish.

1. Export the layout designed to a PNG file

• Go to File
• Click on Export
• Click on Change File Type
• Select PNG Portable Network Graphics from Image File Types
• Name the file what you want

Transfer the layout to Power BI

On the Power BI page,

• Click on Canvas setting on the Visualizations bar.
• Go to Vertical alignment and select Middle
• Go to Type and select Custom
• With this, you can adjust the Height to 1200px and the width to 2500px (depending on your choice)
• Click on Canvas background
• Select Add File on Image field
• A window containing all your files pops up
• Navigate to where you saved the layout created and select it
• Reduce the transparency on Canvas background to 0%

Buttons and icons

Another feature to include in our report is buttons and icons. In case you want to hide some info from your user, Buttons will enable that. They also serve as guides to the users.

Navigation experience

The type of report you build will determine the type of navigation experience you create. A navigation experience also forms part of the immersive report building. It is therefore important to make sure that the interaction with the navigation buttons is great

In this tutorial, this is how we create one:

• Duplicate the page into three pages
• Go to Insert > Elements > Buttons
• From Buttons > Navigator > Page navigator
• A list of the pages shows up
• Click on Format navigator
• From Format navigator > Grid layout >Orientation
• Select Vertical

• Click on one of the four pages
• Go to Style > State
• From State select Selected
• Change the color to your choice
• Go to Style > State
• From State select Hover
• Go to Border
• Select the color Gray (or any color you like)

This will add effect to the pages when you hover on them

• Copy and paste the page navigators to the other pages

Bookmarks

You can create bookmarks that will allow your user to view the results on different levels. We want to create a bookmark that will allow the user to view the results of the data on a monthly and weekly basis.

• Navigate to Elements > Buttons > Blank
• A blank box will appear.
• Click on it and drag it down to duplicate it
• While still clicking on it, switch on Text
• Write Monthly and Weekly in the two blank spaces
• Change the color to white
• Go to Border and switch it off
• Go to Fill and choose Gray color and modify the transparency accordingly

• Populate the three visuals with charts and representations from your datasets accordingly

Additional effects

Some other effects you can add to your report include:

• Tooltips: Default and report page
• Drill through

I hope you had a nice time reading this article. You can sign up for more of our educative sessions here.

Thanks for reading!