WHAT IS A SPLASH PAGE?
A splash page, or landing page, is a great way to set the scene for your report, and let your audience know exactly what to expect when they use it.
It’s also an effective way to package, and/or brand your reports to make them look professionally authored and consistent, which promotes trust from the intended audience.
WHAT SHOULD BE ON IT?
It’s the first thing that opens when your reports are accessed, so it should contain information about the content of the report.
A good place to start is obviously with the title of the report, then maybe a brief abstract, and then a short sentence on data sources and refresh frequency.
Remember, we should always strive to keep our audience engaged, so the key to getting this right is to not put too much information on it.
It should be brief, concise, and to the point. Too much text and the viewers will just become disengaged and skip over it.
HOW WILL I DESIGN IT?
As with all of your report pages, design principles should be adhered to always.
A good way of laying out your text would be to follow the font hierarchy method of having your main title in the largest font size. This is the first thing that the user will read.
Next, would be a slightly smaller, less prominent subtitle or a basic description. This will be the second thing that the audience will read.
The third thing that should be read should be a slightly smaller font than the second, and maybe the final thing that should be read could be the report data source and refresh times. This font would be the smallest.
We use this visual hierarchy to guide the user and prevent them from having their eyes dart all over the page. It’s a process widely used in website design and graphic design.
Instead of adding lots of text boxes to your Power BI canvas to create this splash page, why not just design the page in PowerPoint instead, or Figma. This can then be saved as an image and added to the background of the Power BI report splash page later.
Do not use lots of colours, this can be very distracting, the focus should be on the words, and the message it conveys.
By all means add graphics or visuals, but again, the focus should be on the words on the page and the instruction that it gives to the report viewer.
WHERE WILL I FIND GOOD EXAMPLES FOR INSPIRATION?
When building any report, I always think about implementing a really good user experience, and often, well designed websites are my source of inspiration.
There are some great sites out there to help you design an impactful splash page, such as https://dribbble.com/ or https://www.behance.net/
Look around these sites, get ideas, try things, experiment, if it’s not right first time, then look for further inspiration and don’t be afraid to mix and match different design concepts.
Here’s a quick example that I created for a fictional mock-up sales report.
