Progressive disclosure

1. Progressive disclosure

Welcome to this course on report design in Power BI. In this course, you'll learn about the principles of progressive disclosure, how to customize the view and designing for mobile. For this course, we'll be continuing with the dataset and reports created in our Reports in Power BI course. We highly recommend taking this course as a pre-requisite.

2. What is progressive disclosure?

So, what is progressive disclosure? Progressive disclosure lays out information across several screens, allowing users to perform actions as part of a sequence rather than all at once. This prevents users from being overwhelmed with data, providing them a more curated experience of the data and telling a coherent story. Our report should start with high-level, abstract concepts like totals and aggregates. Then, as people are interested in learning more about a particular topic, they take an action to obtain that specific information. In short, we show specific information only when requested.

3. The current model

In Reports in Power BI course, we have worked primarily in a dashboard paradigm. Although we can filter, scroll, and drill through to other pages, we still try to make everything readily visible to users.

4. A different model

Progressive disclosure, meanwhile, embraces the idea of hiding information until we need it. This makes our flow look and behave more like a web application and less like a dashboard. It also helps us take our users through a journey. They still have control to choose their own adventure but we make sure that their choices will make sense and not overwhelm them with data.

5. The key parts

We can implement progressive disclosure in Power BI using a few key components. First, bookmarks show different states of our report. The Selection pane will allow us to show and hide visuals in those various states. Users could navigate via bookmark but we will use buttons to make it obvious how they can transition from one state to the next. This is especially important if you have several states and want to provide a logical flow between them. The big trick is to have bookmarks only control selected visuals. That way, we can control different screen elements independently, so if I show or hide the Departments table, it does not change which chart I have visible at the bottom of the report.

6. The end state

Our end state is a report which gives users even more control. It's almost like a choose-your-own-adventure story with the data, as we guide them through the story and show them the places where they can make key decisions. This idea is quite different from a dashboard, in which we want to display relevant business metrics in an easy-to-understand fashion. When building a dashboard, we want to avoid making users click, drag, scroll, or otherwise manipulate the screen to get the information they need. With this report, we require user interaction to make the best use of our report. This is also different from a pixel-perfect report, like Power BI paginated reports. Paginated reports are intended for printing, so they display all of the information up-front. You can use parameters in paginated reports to display different subsets of information but ultimately, the intent is static display of information.

7. Final notes

Let's wrap up with a couple quick notes. First, any filters based on a visual will disappear once we hide that visual. For example, if we select a department and then hide the Departments table, our other visuals will reset to having no filter on department. Also, if you are concerned about the performance of so many visuals, that's generally not a problem because hidden visuals don't affect performance.

8. Let's practice!

Now that we know a bit more about the concept, let's apply that knowledge in some exercises.

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