do .
All right hello and welcome my friends to another talk power bi this one is special dashboard showcase and makeover and let's see what's going on with the zoom all right hello hello so if you're joining us on youtube then um hello this is avi singh i'm not in seattle i'm operating out of delhi india right now i'm here to be close to my parents but super excited to be here with you today and i saw jen earlier um.
Robert is here robert um let me make sure we get you on the on the zoom call all right and astronomy nature and music mark hello mark akash is here akash had submitted the dashboard uh by the way i have a list thanks to my team i am well prepared today so we have.
Jeff lumpkin akash antoine mark gabriel and um melon so uh that's gonna be coming up soon but let me say hi to uh quinn fan quinn awesome good to have you on uh happy friday to you too happy lunar year i know chinese new year is coming up grace theo was excited about that she was talking about it um zunair says hi thank you glad you're enjoying the course donald is here.
Awesome heather is here in charleston south carolina um yeah what happened with the zoom link um let's see let's uh fix that first um and yeah it seems let me let me help robert first and maybe robert can help everybody else.
So robert let's get you on my friend do yeah it is kind of weird not having anybody on the zoom call uh okay so robert i sent something over to you and so the talk barbie i link should have been updated.
Oh it wasn't updated bummer oh well um hold on guys so give me a minute so normally the the link here should have said for an open event it should be join us on zoom but it's it's not so.
Let me fix that really quick and robert at least you can join oh man well sorry about the delayed start guys but yeah we'll get going here in a minute okay so i have that sorted out and here.
It should be the zoom link so anybody who's a student in the learn powerbeat program i just post that link in the chat box and yeah you can see me there thank you heather johannes for your best wishes appreciate that you know yeah frankly yeah i mean we're glad for a lot of things we are for one i'm glad that um.
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You know i have the flexibility to just um yeah pretty much uh pick up my laptop
And head over here and uh um yeah so um i'm thankful for that okay so hopefully some of you can join us on zoom and uh but we'll uh we'll kick start it and we'll see how this goes uh robert definitely check in with me.I'm not seeing you on zoom i saw you on youtube but i'm not seeing okay okay so we have let's see okay we have dennis on all right well so um okay cool so tim is here brian robert is here awesome great oh oh boy all right so so robert are everything sorted out so you you you had the instructions from.
Earlier anyway i'm just glad you're here and i'm glad for other folks as well so uh let's do a roll call do we have a student who's on the phone who had submitted their dashboard as well usually we take that first uh robert let's do a mic check let's make sure i can hear you uh can you hear me yep blood unclear.
Cool so um yeah i didn't um so i didn't hear from anybody on the zoom calls so i would presume either either we don't have a student or they're not online um so it seems like it highlighted akash should i just start with that one uh yes yes you mentioned the cash was there so i'll cure on the others awesome great so.
Folks yeah check in with robert um if you had submitted a dashboard and yeah just let him know that you're here and of course if you're a student in the learn power bi program then then yeah it's it's we usually have an opportunity to go deeper okay you know what i'm just gonna stop this video here oh uh start video share screen.
Let's try that all right so folks while that dashboard is coming up let's go over so dashboard showcase and makeover the real premise of that is this statement here in this day and age you can hope to succeed just by doing good work i think you really got to be able to do good work and tell great stories so this is the platform that we have built primarily for our or learn power bi.
Family members but also for our youtube followers where they get a chance to start telling their stories and we hope that this is where they can hone their art like they can come back again and again and can refine and polish and make it a really powerful story which can open doors for them which can get them job interviews which can land them jobs which can lead to a consulting career who knows what right everything is possible um and um and maybe lead to better.
Things i mean maybe this is going to lead to them speaking at conferences and of course we run a power bi conference and so forth so yeah it's it's all exciting stuff okay so let's do the first one so this is sent by akash now akash had sent an adventure works dashboard earlier which i had done actually a private review i'd send it just to him we're going to release that video at some point but here it's an hr dashboard i'm just going to switch.
Through the the pages here and pick one pick a good good page to start with uh overview looks good i guess this is as good as any alright so robert uh we're gonna tag team on this one i hope you're ready all right so robert uh let's start with the squint test so if you were to squint your eyes a little bit kind of half close them what's the first element that jumps out.
At you what's the first thing that you see um i would say
Uh the the column charts on in the middle bottom that's the most prominent thing and i would say because all the colors are black nothing really pumps uh comes out yeah oh shoot what did i do i i messed up something hold on guys okay i'm just gonna check in on the stream make sure it's okay.Okay that looks good so you said uh the bottom the head count by pay type this this one yes yes that one yeah yeah you're right it's it's yeah i mean it is kind of mixed though so folks again we're aiming for a dashboard by design so usually there is an important element in your.
Dashboard and you do want to showcase it and i and um yeah so in this one i'm not sure what it is uh but you know before we dive in though uh first of all let me let me say kudos to akash right so he sent in that adventure works dashboard now he sent this one and again guys it you know so we talked about do good work tell great stories but there's another line which i heard from a ted talk huge fan of ted talks and it was it said don't wait for the perfect story.
Uh start with your story and make it perfect right so that's what this is about start with the story make it perfect so here i would say that maybe so usually usually let's let's look at the elements of this so what i call the bones of the dashboard so this has the high level numbers and this has uh breakdowns and it does not have trends and this one.
Doesn't have details details are kind of optional but you know that those are the kind of bones that i look for on a on a dashboard on a page right uh so it has high level numbers but i think they're not kind of standing out so that needs some work i i think akash should look into doing something to make this part kind of stand out so we did the squint test and nothing.
Kind of rose and and you certainly don't want oh god i keep doing that oops i guess that's good enough so it has good bones overall i think it could have trends maybe uh but that's not a requirement and um yeah so certainly certainly do something to highlight these numbers uh let's switch gears a little bit uh so robert you've probably heard me.
Talk about data pixels and non-data pixels what would you see say are the non-data pixels here i think uh from my opinion everything looks to be more data oriented the nan data pixels are very tiny so for me i think that looks pretty good yeah so i'll just point out some so and they're subtle you're right so one is of course this shadow right.
So you know it's a cool look but it's not data and so they're so of course my my guru is steven few right and he talks about that let data be the star of your show what's uh and anything else is redundant that that's non-data pixel and we can either.
Eliminate it or minimize it so i i totally binded that school of thought and i think that if you look at the modern aesthetics of design if you look at how what what has happened to logos just you know just look at microsoft logos it's all about simplification it's all about kind of flattening um and so forth right so so not only steven few when he talks about dashboard design but overall design uh is moving in that direction and i like it i it's it's it's simple.
It's functional and being functional is beautiful so uh so yeah so we would look at these non-data pixels which includes shadows which includes these border lines this is not data actually these axis lines they're not data and again you know anywhere that elements appear the borders and that sort of stuff so so again i'm not saying don't do it but examine it right look at do a do an audit of your dashboard and just look at which ones are your non-data pixels and.
Once you identify once you list them all out just think about it can can i eliminate it just try it right i mean just try how does it look without a shadow and if you can't if you remove it if you remove the shadow remove the boxes and and then you're like oh you know it doesn't look right well then you bring it back but minimize it can you have it really subtle does it have to be you know kind of sewing your face can it can it be like a light color right so um so you can do all of those things.
Uh so that's the other thing that i would say uh let's see what other elements are here so these these are interesting so this is open filter oh this one is uh this one is always a nice trick kind of a filter panel year month name um i always say that use that with a bit of caution because you know if you if you put slicers right there on the page they're visible people can see them but even here.
Notice that well at least i didn't know right away i had to hover over it and i don't know how how well hover works on mobile devices so there are two concepts when you look at user interface there is discoverability and intuitiveness so discoverability is that they should be able to discover it on their own right i don't i don't want to go around and if if my report has hundreds or thousands of users i don't want to try to reach out to them.
And explain to each one how to use a slicer it should be right there it should right they should be discoverable and once they discover it is it intuitive to use uh what's a good example of that like drill down you know so a drill down in power bi i think it's it's neither discoverable it's you know unless you point it out to user often they have no idea that you can drill down right and it's not intuitive i i still.
Struggle with drill down it's like what are the buttons at the top so that's a counter example but a general in general you're going for making a dashboard which is you know kind of the elements and the features are discoverable and they're intuitive so i'm not saying don't do it but just watch out obviously this makes it sometimes a little bit less discoverable uh but you know good feature certainly saves space and so forth so uh clear filters what is this one yeah i don't know that's just the dashboard i guess oh this is a link to the other one um.
Yeah i feel like this one needs a little bit of work so the way i see it these two elements are different than these two elements uh these elements so the elements over here are navigation elements these are taking the page this one is taken to the employee page this one is taken to the next page the next page right so employee department salary so if they are different if they are apples and oranges well then visually they should.
Look like apples and oranges and right now they don't it looks like they're all kind of the same thing so you need something and sometimes this white space is awesome so just some white space here or you know yeah some some differentiation maybe move these elements a little bit lower or make these smaller you have to do something there because otherwise it's looking like the same thing and uh and it's not this one is kind of.
Filters and this one is navigation so that might be a minor fix there home page that makes sense um cool and and again guys think about this so you know this is is saying these arrows are trying to connect these two but you don't need so again like the non-data pixels try to eliminate them so which which is the most powerful element in your dashboard design it's white space the smartest best uh people who.
The best dashboard designers oh god uh yeah i guess that's a term i made it up they they use white space extremely effectively that's what differentiates kind of good to great report developers so here you don't need this arrow you don't need that you can just use white space to connect it visually and so if you delete that and and you can do it in so many ways so for one.
Certainly man the shadow needs to go uh but yeah if you just put it next to it you know people are smart they're gonna get it right so so yeah just just just by putting these elements a little bit closer together and a little bit closer together they're gonna understand and of course if you actually you know what give me give me a second i'm just gonna the shadow is i actually don't even know i've never done shadow okay so let's get rid of the shadow.
And let's get rid of the border much better and uh uh yeah you know we'll do the same thing so yeah it actually let's just try it let's just try it so here we go and turn off the shadow border turn it off.
And do the same thing here man i'm already feeling kind of good okay now think about this so of course there's there's actually a lot that i'm noticing now so of course this this whole thing this banner here think about these pixels that's non-data this dark deep black that's not data.
So the way to think about it is that imagine if if you were paying for every single pixel that you colored right white space is free or cheap what it's one dollar right that's that's a single unit but the darker the pixel is the more you pay so maybe a really dark pixel is thousand dollars right light one is maybe a little less would you really want to pay all this money for lighting up this non-data no i wouldn't right i mean i would i can i can spend.
It on my data like this is signifying data this is showing me data the employees things is not so so yeah so let's make it subtle let's go there and actually border shadow visual header data labels and what if this was subtle oops that's not it okay i think i think i'm gonna stop messing with it now but you get the idea right so.
So i think a little bit of a visual cleanup would make this just elegant and beautiful so it's got good bones but um i think the non-data pixels they're kind of hijacking the dashboard uh cool so i think i think a lot of this stuff is probably going to apply to the other sheets so we wouldn't go into each one so let me check in with robert again so robert do we have anybody else who's kind of checked in who submitted their dashboard.
Yes jeff jeff is in oh awesome okay so let's go oh you know what i've totally forgot i was supposed to put this up all right so jeff i'm gonna bring up your dashboard and we're gonna do that next so folks if you're on the phone and it is and if you have submitted the dashboard definitely let us know.
Okay now i've lost my zoom video uh hold on guys let me oh there we go and so this was our cautious all right so first of all of course thanks to jeff for submitting this sending this in.
As i said at the beginning you know do good work and tell great stories so let's see what's going on here kobe 19 um i i i will say off the bat that um yeah i tend to love business data and and uh yeah i'm not a huge fan of uh kind of taking public data sets and creating dashboards off of that it may seem like a good.
Exercise but i believe it's not i believe it's it's misleading i believe that if you want to be really good at power bi what you need is real practice and that involves two things that involves real data and a real client all right there we go um so yeah so maybe unless your company is.
