I’m excited to announce that I will be offering a full-day pre-con about Power BI report design in the coming year called Bookmarks, brain pixels, and bar charts: creating effective Power BI reports. For a full session description and prerequisites, please visit the session page.

I built this pre-con to help people better approach report design as an interdisciplinary activity where we are communicating with humans, not just regurgitating data or putting shiny things on a page. There are many misconceptions out there about report design. Some people see it as just a “data thing” that only developers do. Many BI developers avoid it and try to focus on what they consider to be more “hardcore data” tasks. I often hear from people that they can’t make a good report because they aren’t artistic. This hands-on session will dispel those misconceptions and help you clarify your definition of a good Power BI report. You will see how you can apply some helpful user interface design and cognitive psychology concepts to improve your reports. And you’ll leave with tips, tricks, and a list of helpful resources to use in your future report design endeavours.

Your report design choices should be intentional, not haphazard or just the Power BI defaults. We’ll review guidelines to help you make good design choices and look at good and bad examples. And we’ll spend some time as a group creating a report to implement the concepts we discuss.

Basic familiarity with Power BI is helpful for attendees. If you know how to add a visual to a report page, populate it with data, and change some colors, that’s all you need. If you feel like you lack a good process for report design to ensure your reports are polished and professional, this session will share an approach you can adopt to help accomplish your design and communication goals. If you feel like your reports are luckluster or not well-received by their intended audience, join me to learn some tips to improve. If you are a more experienced report designer and you want to learn some new techniques and see the latest Power BI reporting features, you’ll find that information in this session as well.

So far, I’m scheduled to present this session at two SQLSaturdays in Q1 2020:

SQLSaturday Austin – BI – February 7, 2020. Please register on Eventbrite.

SQLSaturday Chicago – March 20, 2020. Please register on Eventbrite.

SQLSaturday pre-cons are very reasonably priced. This is a great way to get a full day of training on a low budget! I hope to see you in Austin or Chicago.

Every once in a while, someone asks a question like “Can Power BI be accessible?” or “Is Power BI WCAG compliant?” It makes me happy when people recognize the need for accessibility in Power BI. (I’ll save the discussion about compliance not automatically ensuring accessibility for another day.) But most people don’t appreciate the answer to either question.

The answer is that WCAG compliance and accessible design are highly dependent upon the report creator. Microsoft has added many built-in accessibility features such as keyboard navigation, high contrast view, and screen reader compatibility. But they can’t make your report automatically accessible as there are accessibility features requiring configuration by the report designer. We need to set the tab order and alt text and use descriptive chart titles – there is no artificial intelligence to do this for us (yet?). Beyond that, things like color contrast and colorblind-friendly design are almost entirely the responsibility of the report designer.

Accessible design used to be solely the domain of UI developers. But as we democratize analytics to have everyone building reports, we now have to create awareness and a sense of responsibility among Power BI report creators, especially those who don’t consider themselves developers.

There is a similar challenge going on with data security. It used to be that people thought of it as a concern only for the IT department. Now, it is widely accepted that everyone in an organization plays a role in maintaining data security. I hope the same attitude will be widely adopted when it comes to accessibility in data visualization and analytics.

This challenge is present in any low-code environment with users of diverse backgrounds and technical expertise, which means it is relevant to the entire Power Platform and other similar tools. There is a white paper on PowerApps Accessibility Standards and Guidelines that has a great description of the situation.

PowerApps embodies the idea of “democratization of development”—anyone in your organization can quickly and easily create a powerful app and share it broadly. But the app maker has an ethical, and sometimes legal, obligation to support “democratization of usage” as well—any user of your app must be able to use it as it was intended.

Based upon the popularity of the Power Platform, I’d say the democratization of development has been a wild success. But we still have some steps to take to democratize usage. Microsoft is doing their part to make their products accessible and to fix accessibility bugs quickly. Now we need to recognize and honor our obligation to design inclusively.

The Microsoft Docs on accessible report design were recently updated to provide more guidance. I hope you’ll check them out and start implementing the recommendations in your reports.

DCAC recently had a custom PowerPoint template built for us. We use PowerPoint for teaching technical concepts, delivering sales and marketing presentations, and more. One thing I love about working at DCAC is that each of the 6 consultants is also a speaker at conferences. So we all care about making presentation content understandable and memorable.

In addition to the general desire to be an effective presenter, I have a special interest in accessible design. I speak and consult on accessibility in Power BI report design. So I feel a responsibility to try to be accessible in all areas of visual design. In addition, I know that making things more accessible tends to increase usability for everyone.

PowerPoint templates in general reduce manual efforts to assign colors, set fonts and font sizes, and implement other design properties such as animations. I’m all for making a decision once, templatizing it, and making it easy to instantiate. But most of the templates available within PowerPoint and sold online don’t follow good presentation design practices. That is to say, the formatting gets in the way of the content.

Having a template made

Anyone can make a PowerPoint template. You just have to learn how master slides work. Lots of marketing and graphic design companies offer to create PowerPoint templates. But they are mostly concerned with staying on brand or making something shiny. But people make presentations because we want to communicate information. I wanted our template to make it easy for us to follow some good design practices, including accessibility.

So I reached out to my friend Echo Rivera who has her own company, Creative Research Communications, that specializes in making visually engaging presentations about highly technical topics. I came across one of her tweets a couple of years ago and visited her website. Some of the things I have learned from Echo’s courses and blog posts include:

• effective use of images
• how to avoid putting too much text on a slide
• left aligning content to make it easier to read
• I don’t need bullet points on my slides
• how to apply Gestalt Principles to presentation design

Echo worked with me to make a template that followed good design practices but was flexible enough for a variety of content and audiences. And we also made the template fairly accessible! I’m pleased with the way our template turned out. A template can’t do everything for you, but it can give you a good start.

The process of presentation template design

I found the process of designing the template interesting, so I thought I would share a bit about that.

First, I sent Echo some samples of the presentations we give and some ideas on a color palette. We met to discuss our corporate personality, our presentation needs, and our goals for the template. Then a few members of the DCAC team helped me pick some potential images for the title slide.

Next we picked icons and colors for sections that we thought we would commonly include in presentations. We stuck with a white background to make it easier to use images and diagrams from online (so we wouldn’t have to expend effort removing image backgrounds when they weren’t transparent). It also made it easier to choose colors with good contrast.

Once we got the full draft of the template, the team reviewed it and tried it out on some slides. And because things were going too smoothly, we decided we didn’t like the image we selected for the title slide, and chose another one. We made a few adjustments to default font sizes so that slides would fit our company name and slide headings with long technology names on a single line. We also adjusted the position of the slide heading text on slides with the line and icon at the top (shown below) so the text didn’t sit directly on the line.

We made a version of the slide template that has a small single-color logo on each slide. I plan to use this for sales slides and other situations where we need to ensure our name is on a slide when taken out of context (like a screenshot of a single slide). But the logo is small and not distracting so it doesn’t negatively impact design.

We made the template expecting that team members would adjust the master slides and use the provided multi-purpose layouts as needed for each presentation. We will change icons and use blank slides to add diagrams and big images. We also have multiple options for title and thank you slides.

Benefits of our new PowerPoint template

There is a lot to the new template, and examples below are shown without a ton of background explanation. But I couldn’t write this blog post and not show some examples, and I didn’t want this post to turn into a novel.

Our slides use color contrast to create visual interest while staying close to our corporate color palette.

The spacing and font sizes allow for about 6 lines of text max in an all-text slide. Our default font size for text content is 32pt.

We used icons and color to denote sections in our presentations.

I think the best thing that this process has done is encourage us to use less text and more images. Check out the recently created slides from one of John’s presentations below.

My checklist for accessibility in visual presentation design includes:

• font sizes no smaller than 24pt
• color contrast that meets WCAG standards (3:1 for large text, 4.5:1 for smaller text)
• avoiding using color as the only means of conveying information
• avoiding color combinations that are problematic for people with color vision deficiency

Echo worked patiently and diligently with me to measure and adjust colors to meet these criteria. It was great to have someone that understood these goals.

Feedback from other team members

To be honest, I think it took some time for the template to grow on people. But most of us have warmed to it. If you are used to small images, lots of text, and extensive use of clip art and smart art, switching to the template can be a bit difficult. But that’s kind of the point.

Echo gave us some videos on how to use the template and some slide makeover examples when she delivered the template, and I asked the team to watch this TEDx talk. That reinforced the design goals and choices.

I asked the team for comments, and this is what they said.

“I like having a professional-looking, themed template that isn’t just something out of the box that looks like everyone else’s. The template, plus the helpful background info force you to think about what you are puking onto a single slide. It will lead to some semi-major rewrite/re-evaluation of about every presentation I do. “

Kerry

“The template, in part with it’s notes and reminders, helps me to ensure that I put the proper amount of context on a given slide.  It’s a balancing act with font size and content.  If I have to reduce the font size below 32 pt and I still have content to provide, it goes on another slide.”

John

Final thoughts

Will every slide we make be perfect and beautiful? No. But this template will help us avoid common mistakes like having too much text on the slide, and it provides some built-in accessibility without us having to remember to make adjustments.

I really enjoyed working with and learning from Echo, and I recommend her for your presentation design needs. I want to note that she prefers that you take her training before she does custom design work for you so you have a mutual design foundation to build upon. But her courses are great, so that’s not a hardship.

It’s also a privilege to work with people that share and support my goals of effective presentation delivery and accessible design. PowerPoint templates are part of the branding and marketing collateral in an organization, and I love what this says about DCAC.

I’m happy to be speaking at Microsoft Ignite this year. I have an unconference session and a regular session, both focused on accessibility in the Power Platform.

The regular session, Techniques for accessible report design in Microsoft Power BI, will be Wednesday, November 6 at 2:15pm. In this session I’ll discuss the features available in Power BI for making accessible reports and demonstrate techniques for making your reports easier to use. This session will be recorded, so if you can’t make it to Ignite, you can catch it online.

My unconference session, Accessibility in the Microsoft Power Platform, is a chance to have a discussion about accessibility in Power BI and PowerApps. It will be held on Thursday, November 7 at 10:45 am. Unconference sessions at Ignite include facilitor-led discussion and exercises that encourage audience participation where everyone can share their experiences and opinions. If you will be at Ignite and want to share struggles or successes in improving accessibility or raising awareness of accessibility issues, please join me.

This year at Ignite there is a reservation system for unconferences. You can RSVP while you are building your schedule on the website. Walk-ins will be accepted just before the session, assuming there is room. But please RSVP if you want to be sure to get a seat in an unconference session. Unconference sessions are not recorded, so this will be an in-person session only. But I will post materials through the Ignite website once the session is over.

If you will be at Ignite, please stop by and say hello and meet Artemis the Power BI accessibility aardvark.