
Unlocking the Power of BI Dashboards for Better Decision-Making
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Zebra BI’s 46th webinar explored ways to effectively leverage the power of BI dashboards to drive actionable decisions and improve data adoption within organizations. The session was hosted by Andrej, founder and CEO of Zebra BI and focused on actionable strategies to design user-friendly dashboards, help users adopt reports and interpret data, and maximize new features for better business outcomes.

Andrej was joined by Tine, head of the Business Intelligence team at Zebra BI, and Tilen, a lead consultant who has worked in the Big Four accounting firms before. They shared their hands-on insights and addressed common challenges in business intelligence (BI) implementation.

The Background
Despite advances in BI tools like Power BI, the stats are sobering —only 26% of organizations achieve meaningful BI adoption, while 74% of employees feel overwhelmed by data. Andrej argued that these numbers reflect a failure to address user needs through dashboard design, onboarding, and usability.
This webinar offered actionable solutions, aided by practical Zebra BI examples, to help businesses close the gap between data availability and impactful usage.
Designing and Launching User-Friendly Dashboards
Tine emphasized that great dashboards must be user-friendly and tailored to different audience groups for true effectiveness. He categorized users into three types—executives, casual business users, and power users—each with unique needs that must inform dashboard design.
1. Executive Users
Executives, including C-level leaders and directors, require highly personalized dashboards. Tine stressed the importance of simplicity, recommending dashboards with minimal filters (only the essentials, like a monthly view), high-level KPIs, and actionable commentary to provide context. As you can see in the screenshot below, examples from Zebra BI demonstrate the transformation of cluttered dashboards into concise versions that clearly communicated performance.

2. Casual Business Users
Casual users generally work with standard organizational reports and may have limited data literacy. Tine explained scalable onboarding strategies for this group, such as interactive tutorial videos, clear how-to materials, and PowerPoint guides shared on internal platforms like SharePoint. Additionally, utilizing power users within departments to train colleagues amplifies adoption efforts.

3. Power Users
Analysts and data-literate employees benefit from dashboards that allow advanced customization, such as filtering, deep drill-throughs, and data export capabilities. Zebra BI empowers this audience with tools that assist in investigating the underlying factors driving key metrics. Fostering an internal community among power users to share tips and streamline the reporting ecosystem across the organization.
By customizing dashboards to fit these user groups’ requirements, companies can enable smoother adoption and encourage actionable insights.

Interpreting Dashboard Data

Tilen shared insights into interpreting data effectively, framed by the “3/30/300 Rule.” This approach ensures users can quickly identify key insights:
- First 3 Seconds: Dashboards should reveal the most critical KPIs and draw attention to anomalies or variances using visual elements.

- Next 30 Seconds: Users explore trends, gaps, and categories to focus their investigation.

- Next 300 Seconds: Details and interactive tools allow a deeper understanding of causes and actionable measures.

For example, Tilen highlighted a sales dashboard where users observed KPIs in the upper-left corner, then used charts to identify trends, and tables to locate significant performance drivers. Following the IBCS guidelines, visuals such as green for positive variances and red for negative simplified interpretation, ensuring easy engagement with data.
Tine also emphasized that users should leave dashboards with answers to four key questions:
- What is our performance?
- How good or bad is the outcome?
- Why did this happen?
- What actions are necessary to address the issue?
Maximizing Dashboard Features to Drive Better Decisions, Faster
Tine highlighted several powerful features in Power BI and Zebra BI tools used to enhance dashboard usability and interactivity:
- Tooltips: Instantly provide users additional insight into data points without the need for navigation. For example, hovering over poor product performance in Zebra BI revealed contributing regional variances, such as underperformance in the UK and US.

- Drill-Throughs: This feature enables users to isolate specific data points and move to detailed pages filtered for further analysis. Tine demonstrated its value by drilling down into a below-plan product category, uncovering granular performance details like country-specific metrics.


- Cross-Filtering: Allows users to dynamically apply filters across multiple areas of a report, as Tine demonstrated by narrowing full-time employee satisfaction data with control-clicks to explore the intersection of satisfaction scores, job roles, and degrees.

- Bookmarks: Customizable views act as personal shortcuts that users can revisit during meetings for follow-up action. For instance, bookmarks were used to focus on specific product lines or regional data discussed in meetings, streamlining the process of recalling pivotal insights.
- Expand and collapse: Zebra BI incorporates an expand and collapse feature that enables users to drill down into specific data points or condense sections for a cleaner view. This functionality enhances flexibility, allowing users to focus on relevant data without losing the overall context of the dashboard.

- Comments: Zebra BI focuses heavily on integrating comments directly into dashboards, serving as action-oriented notes during discussions. Adding comments to financial variances during a meeting provides clear instructions, like suggesting cost cuts or highlighting priority initiatives, ensuring they remain actionable

Practical Meeting Integration
Andrej also detailed how dashboards could drive efficient, data-centric meetings when paired with these advanced features. Dashboards should be shared beforehand, allowing colleagues to use comments and bookmarks for pre-meeting discussions.
During meetings, live dashboards (as opposed to static screenshots) enable real-time filtering, cross-referencing, and data exploration. This approach empowers teams to convert insights into actions, tracked continuously on the same dashboards.

Zebra BI: Closing the Gap between Users, Data, and Insights
If you are looking for additional information, Zebra BI provides businesses comprehensive resources to enhance their BI capabilities:
- Zebra BI Academy offers free online courses for dashboard creation and data modeling.
- Templates and case studies help users replicate successful practices.
- Recorded webinars and demos provide advanced tips and real-time support for Power BI features.
By customizing dashboards for different user needs, fostering data literacy via onboarding, and using interactive features to support insights and actionable solutions, organizations can bridge the gap between raw data and impactful decision-making. Solutions like Zebra BI prove invaluable in developing a truly data-driven culture.