Easy As Insights — Part 1: Improving Power BI User Experience — Using Navigation Pages
In this series of “Easy As Insights” articles I will cover some of the best practices for improving user experience of Power BI insights reports users, especially if you are in the corporate world where your team is developing insights for many departments and users across the organization.
In this article I will explain how a team can make Power BI reports with many tabs/pages more user friendly so that users can easily find the required tab/page and navigate to it easily.
The problem — many many tabs/pages in a report
It is not unusual for a Power BI report to have many many tabs. Some complex reports could even have more than 50 tabs/pages.
When a report has many tabs it becomes impossible for user to remember which tab to access for what purposes!
The best way to solve this issue to have Navigation Pages.
The solution — Navigation Pages
Navigation Pages are like Table of Contents. It is logical grouping of a collection of tabs/pages in the insight report (.pbix file) enabling user to select the required tab and navigate to it easily.
I use an image and text box to display the screenshot of the tab/page and a description of the insights provided in the tab. The image is useful as many users will remember the page visuals that understanding the report from the text. The images have action set the ‘Action’ attribute set to the appropriate tab/page — so when the user clicks on the image he/she is taken to the respective tab.
Since the Navigation Page is another tab/page in the report (.pbix file), the same insights tab could be listed under multiple Navigation Page depending on logical grouping and user requirement.
The Navigation Pages like a Table of Contents can be logically organized to enable different level of navigation.
But this would also mean the individual tabs would need navigation buttons to return to parent navigation page and top level navigation page. This could be sometimes be confusing to some users. Therefore it is always better to keep the structure flat and simple for improved user experience!
Easy As Insights Series of Articles
Easy As Insights — Part 1: Taming Power BI Maintenance — Insights Template
Easy As Insights — Part 2: Taming Power BI Maintenance — Visuals Naming Conventions
Easy As Insights — Part 3: Taming Power BI Maintenance — Bookmarks Naming Conventions
Easy As Insights — Part 5: Improving Power BI User Experience — Using Navigation Pages
