How can you make sure your BI tool is user-friendly?

In my opinion, the importance of thoroughly understanding users is frequently underestimated in Business Intelligence. This vital process often gets misinterpreted as simply acquiring knowledge about the user's business processes. However, it goes far beyond that surface-level understanding. Truly knowing our users means delving deeper into their individual characteristics, preferences, and behaviours. It involves comprehending not just the 'what' and 'how' of their interactions with our systems, but also the 'why' behind their actions

1. Understand the business problem one is trying to solve and what are the stakeholders wanting to know. 2. Sketch the visualization, make sure the appropriate data points are included, ensure the design is not very cluttered. 3. Make sure the visualization flows logically and drives the end user to a solution or guide towards a decision 4. Add Metadata at appropriate locations to enable users understand the data points. 5. In case there are different personas that need the tool, align and design as per the requirements.

I think it's important to understand your users before selecting or designing a BI tool. It's essential to know who the users are, their objectives, and their preferred ways of interacting with data. User research, interviews, or focus groups can be employed to gather user feedback and insights. User personas, scenarios, and journeys can help represent their goals, needs, and pain points. Regardless of the user base, a BI tool should be designed for clarity and intuitive understanding. The primary message of any report should be immediately apparent, enabling users, even without expert help, to extract necessary insights for decision-making. This approach ensures that the BI tool is accessible and valuable to all users.

Audience is playing a key role in Reporting side . At end of the day they need to consume and use it . Developer needs to understand their audience first whether it’s sales team , finance team and any other team. Your report is going to help those team to analyse and play with your data .

Understand the requirements and you can innovate your ideas using inbuilt features of Dashboard. Your dashboard should be clean and concise and tells a story when audience has to look and feel

For drill-down in Tableau, we can use Set as well as Parameter Actions. Parameter Actions are similar like filters and can be easily understood by Users.

There are quite a few factors to consider when it comes to choosing the right tool and features. 1. Usage - Understand the requirements of the team/ Org and based on it choose the tool and its features. 2. Longevity - Important to understand whether the tool will be used for a short period or could play a crucial role going forward. 3. Audience - Not everyone will be comfortable with advanced features like AI or Machine learning.

Optimizing the performance can be done by removing unnecessary filters, fields, hide unused fields etc. Sometimes even migrating some of the calculations to SQL would suffice as load of BI Tool becomes less

In my experience, reducing complexity is the most important aspect of a good business intelligence interface. Having too many components of either the semantic model, or the report/dashboard itself is usually a product of either trying to satisfy too many user personas with one product, or not knowing your user personas well enough. The other very common problem is that technical people create these products as a checkbox exercise, without any intention placed on the UX, and without validating useability.

Whenever we design dashboards for Clients, after everythings freezed, we design a training manual for them to understand and get help. Similarly for Tableau Public vizzes, people have used containers to make a screen which tells other people what the fields are, what it means and what chart tells you