Crafting Beeline’s Data Visualization Style Guidelines

A data visualization style guide and theme that brings consistency and accessibility across data products in the Beeline ecosystem.

Problem

There were no pre-built templates or theme presets, so every report new and old lacked consistency which created lack of brand identify, cognitive work for our end users, and extra work for our data team to make design decisions.

PROCESS & DISCOVERY

Audit, Interview, & Research

I spent the first three weeks understanding the actual scope of the inconsistency and what issues they created for stakeholders and users alike.

Audit

I reviewed the entire sales demo sight that had twenty two dashboard and found major inconsistency that boiled down to page layout, use of color, and lack of supporting text for charts.

Interview

Interviewing the data team was eye opening on how limited Power BI as a tool can be for them. I was also able to surface what was actually blocking consistency, and why the team would push back on design.

Research

To my surprise I had a hard time finding data visualization style guides. So I dug into the Power BI documentation site and found out about base themes, and theme JSON files and how our team could use them to solve the consistency problem.

KEY DISCOVERY

When I mentioned creating templates as a solution, the data team said, ABSOLUTELY NOT! Their fear was locking down layouts would kill their ability to craft data freely, and they were already boxed in with a novice development team.