Three seconds. When a user arrives at a Power BI report, that’s how long you have to seize their attention with the most critical facts. As they mouse-over the report, they search for their most important categories and trends, then their details-on-demand… do they quickly find answers to their questions, or do they drown in the data of yet another report? The answer isn’t solely determined by elegant and performant visuals or deep AI and analytics; Power BI developers need to first know their users, then design a holistically effective, logical user experience. This experience, known as the Information-Seeking Mantra – or the 3/30/300 rule - leverages visual best practices to split the report into three parts: The information gained by the user in (A) three seconds, (B) thirty seconds and (C) three hundred seconds. In the deeper layers, interactivity in Power BI enables powerful, self-driven question-and-answer data exploration. Effectively combining both these visual and functional elements in a user-oriented way can lead to powerhouse reporting that can revolutionize a workplace. With these reports, Business users can test their ideas and questions to get reliable answers, and, more importantly, use them to drive actions to get the desired results.

In this talk, we will explain three principles we employ in an effort to design quality, usable Power BI reports that allow business users to quickly answer both basic and complex questions in an action-oriented way. We see these principles as valuable best practice guidelines for (1) co-creating reports with users, as well as (2) visual and (3) functional guidelines for design. For (1), we will illustrate our typical approach to user-oriented design using examples. For (2), we will illustrate key data visualization principles and demonstrate how they are typically executed when designing a report in Power BI using the default visualization types. For (3) we will demonstrate our experience with effectively leveraging powerful interactions in Power BI like drillthrough, graphical tooltips, page navigation, dynamic measure & dimension selection, and more. In addition, (2) – (3) will include short technical 'recipes' on how to these can be implemented by yourself. Finally, we will put it all together with an example that we hope highlights how the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. By the end of the talk, we hope you will understand this approach to design, and the value it can provide in designing useful Power BI reports.