The One-Click Solution

I recorded the first quarter of my new Power BI Weekly series course for LinkedIn Learning as a batch of thirteen videos (one for each week of Q2 2022). As I was creating and developing the content for these lessons, I realized I was sub-conscientiously injecting a bit of a theme into some of them. In the tech world, we love to minimize the number of clicks it takes to do something. Here are a few well-known examples of this phenomenon.

1. Amazon's option to immediately buy the product you're looking at
2. Facebook at one point automatically added people to groups others invited them to join

The IKEA Effect

We can use this one-click approach in Power BI as well, but let's talk about another concept first that empowers the end users of our Power BI dashboards and analysis: the IKEA effect. Named after the eponymous Swedish furnishing chain, this effect occurs when customers do much of the work to assemble the product, they feel great about the work they do, and they also subsequently believe they achieve greater value for their investment. One caveat though, is that the work the customer does is essentially the last mile of the furniture construction process. Before a product even hits the warehouse shelf, someone at the IKEA product development team has to design and construct a prototype of the product. Even the furniture flatpack that customers buy from the warehouse floor is precut and drilled with holes. When the customer takes it home and opens the box, all they should need to do is follow the instructions to put it together.

Check out a fantastic overview of the impact of the IKEA effect in this BBC article!

While Power BI is a business intelligence platform instead of an item of furniture, we can still apply the idea of the IKEA effect to how we design the data models for the end user of our analysis. Like the design and construction of the pieces that go into a furniture flatpack, much of the work for getting the data, and then cleaning and organizing it, happens behind the scenes. The end user won't see all the work involved in creating data tables in Power Query, building DAX measures, and then configuring and formatting visuals in the report pages. Much like the pre-made pieces in a furniture flatpack, the customer of our final product in Power BI only sees the visuals, tables, and trends we share with them in the final step of the development process.

We can, however, let them interactively control the outcomes they see in the model we built for them through dynamic elements we intentionally add to the view, including:

• Slicers to choose a smaller segment of the displayed data points like categorical labels, date ranges, or numerical thresholds
• Visuals that choose a smaller section of the data points, much like a slicer does
• Custom tooltips that appear upon hovering over a data point to provide what's analogous to a third dimension of analysis on a two-dimensional page

Adding a Reset Button

Giving the end-user of our Power BI models the capability to feel ownership in their analysis by selecting a smaller section of the data points does however mean that they can also easily find themselves lost when they apply many filters to the view at the same time. If we want to help them get back to their initial analysis view, we can configure a reset button directly on a report page. With a single click, they can easily remove the filters they applied themselves to the data points in a dashboard. To make this happen within Power BI, we combine together the built-in functionalities of bookmarks and buttons. Check out how to do it in last week's Power BI Weekly video!

Power BI Meetup Group

For those who also live in Houston. Texas, we're restarting the Power BI user group! Our meetings will be held on the 3rd Thursday of each month from 4 to 6 pm. We held our first meeting today at the Cyviz offices in the Galleria area. Our next meeting will be on Thursday, June 16th at the Cyviz offices again. Join our Meetup group to receive the latest updates and to sign up for future meetings. Thanks to Andy Clark and Glen Accardo for your hard work getting this group up and running again this year, and a big thank you to the Cyviz team for hosting us in your beautiful office.

This week's Power BI Weekly video shows how to layer and group visual elements together within a single report page. More on this topic as well as map layers in next week's newsletter!

-HW