Subscribe to reports in Power BI
Integrating advanced scheduling options into a simple interface. Designing under constraint.
tl;dr
When paginated reports were first announced in Power BI, Gartner specifically cited the lack of subscription scheduling customization options as a caution for people considering making the move to Power BI. I drove the initiative to enhance email subscription scheduling capabilities within Power BI, leading to over 1M e-mails sent in the first 15 days of the month; over 200k more than the prior month.
Power BI Personas
I start this case study by talking about the Power BI personas I work most closely with. The #1 user response we receive for Power BI is that it is 'hard to use' therefore the design team has been focusing primarily on designing experiences based off our business end user, Nat as they are less tech-savy than our analyst persona, Ash.
The problem
E-Mail Subscriptions are, for many paginated report users, the key reason why they use SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS). Over 7 times as many files are exported manually or automatically through an email subscription than are viewed live in SSRS every month. When Power BI started advertising the paginated reports integration into Power BI Gartner specifically cautioned existing SSRS customers from using the service as it didn't have the ability to subscribe to the same features for distributing subscriptions as users were accustomed.
Example of an email subscription
When a user subscribes to emails they will receive an email in their inbox at their selected frequency. It contains a snapshot of the first page of the report, an attached report an a link to open the report in Power BI. A large percent of users never consume a report directly through Power BI as they will just view it from their inbox.
Primary goals​
Step 1: Analyzing current capabilities in Power BI
The original design for Power BI subscriptions was a very simple interface with only a few basic options. This was optimized for the Nat persona who is not very tech-savvy and wants a simple, intuitive interface. Options like granting access to a report or subscribing others are only available for a report author who is described as our Ash persona.
Step 2: Analyzing current capabilities in SSRS
To set an SSRS subscription, users go through multiple pages of detailed customization options. There are lots of capabilities far beyond what is available in Power BI such as shared report delivery schedules and Onedrive file delivery. In SSRS users can set an hourly, daily, weekly, or monthly subscription with start and end dates and start time. This customization option is very important to SSRS users who are almost entirely the Ash persona. They do not need a simplified, basic interface but instead want the ability to create hundreds of customized subscriptions of and needed to be implemented in Power BI.
Step 3: Analyzing and combining experiences
After documenting all of the options for Power BI subscriptions and SSRS subscriptions I worked with the Project Manager and engineering teams to decide which options needed to be included from both experiences for the Power BI paginated report subscriptions. Some options are still only available to report authors (Ash) such as subscribing others and granting access to the report. A Nat user wouldn't need these same capabilities.
The bigger problem...design constraints
This project was full of constraints that really limited the overall design I was able to deliver in the end. The code for the current subscription panel was very old and difficult to work with but we did not have the time or budget to redesign it from scratch. Here are just a few of the constraints I worked under. I point these out because as a designer, I know the overall experience could be better but this is what we were able to do with the time, budget, and resources the team of 9 had available to us.
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Use the same basic panel design
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Parameters can't be edited in the side panel
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No research support
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No user testing support
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No content writing
Step 4: Exploring designs and user flows
Here are some of my ideas I explored during the design process. I looked at increasing the panel size, having pop-up dialogues for more advanced options, using text to describe frequency choices, and designing a complete new subscription wizard.
Design to allow user to see parameters when setting up a subscription.
Design for editable parameters was not possible due to engineering constraints.
Explored if a large panel would help subscription area not look so small but it didn't really fix the problem.
Exploration on custom frequency option for users.
Another idea I looked at for scheduling frequency.
Yet another way of showing frequency.
Three step process exploration to have more of a wizard style subscription process. Rejected due to engineering costs.
Three step process exploration to have more of a wizard style subscription process. Rejected due to engineering costs.
Three step process exploration to have more of a wizard style subscription process. Rejected due to engineering costs.
Final design
In the end we decided on this final design to be implemented in Power BI Service. There are many added capabilities for the Ash persona and everything fit inside the medium size panel. This fit our design constraints as well as satisfied our SSRS users.
Email subscriptions in Power BI passed 1 million subscriptions within the first 15 days from the release of this new design. That was 200k more than any previous month! SSRS users were delighted to see these updates to Power BI subscription service. The team continues to build new features such as monthly subscriptions of parameterized reports.
