Data storytelling
Your dashboard adoption problem is a design problem
Accuracy gets you a report nobody opens. The gap between a dashboard that's technically correct and one your team actually uses is design — and it's the highest-leverage work in analytics.
Power BI is everywhere. It sits atop the analytics market, runs in 97% of Fortune 500 companies, and serves tens of millions of active users every month. And yet, inside most organisations, the dashboards nobody asked to retire quietly go unused.
The numbers are stark. Research suggests only about 16% of organisations reach full Power BI adoption, while 58% sit under 25%. Across BI tools generally, average adoption has been stuck around a quarter of intended users for years. If your monthly report usage is below ~70%, you simply aren't getting the value you paid for.
The instinct is to blame the data — "the numbers must be wrong", "people don't trust it". Occasionally that's true. Far more often, the data is fine and the experience is the problem.
Adoption is won or lost in the first ten seconds
Gartner found that after a negative first experience with new software, 40% of employees avoid it or use it as little as possible. A dashboard gets one chance to answer the question in the user's head. If it opens on a wall of twelve charts, three slicers and a legend nobody reads, the executive closes the tab and goes back to asking an analyst by email. The report was accurate. It just wasn't usable.
The fastest dashboard is the one your team actually opens.
This is why we treat design as the core discipline of analytics, not the decoration applied at the end. Design is what turns a correct answer into a used one.
Four principles we won't compromise on
1. The answer first
Lead with the decision, not the data. The top of every report should state the single most important thing — revenue vs plan, the exception that needs attention, the trend that changed — before any detail. The detail is one intuitive click away, never the opening act.
2. Hierarchy over density
More charts is not more insight. A page with a clear visual hierarchy — one hero metric, a supporting trend, then the breakdowns — is read in seconds. A page with equal-weight everything is read by no one. Ruthless editing is the work.
3. A design system, not a one-off
Consistency compounds. When every report shares the same colour language, layout grid, typography and interaction patterns, users learn the system once and read every report faster forever. Branded Power BI themes and reusable components are how you scale that consistency across a portfolio.
4. Built for the decision, not the dataset
Start from the question the report exists to answer and the action it should trigger — then design backwards. A report that maps to a real decision gets used because it earns its place in someone's week.
Adoption is the ROI multiplier
Every pound spent on a data platform is only realised when someone acts on what it shows. A beautifully engineered model feeding a report nobody opens returns nothing. Design is the multiplier that converts the platform investment into decisions made faster — which is the only metric that ever mattered.
So before you commission another data source or another visual, ask a harder question: is the report your team already has the easiest place in the business to find the answer? If not, that's not a data problem to solve with more data. It's a design problem — and it's the one worth solving first.