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Fix the redesigned Power BI site

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Jeffrey Weir's profile image

Jeffrey Weir on 17 Oct 2020 08:44:31

There are so many design flaws in the Ideas Site redesign that I can't even recall them all. But here's the issues I can remember. I encourage others to leave additional issues in the comments.

1. Clicking on an ideas link posted in say Twitter takes you to the idea, but you are then prompted to log in, and once you do, it takes you to the Home page and not to the idea you originally clicked on.

2. Many users have detailed that they can see Ideas on the mobile Ideas site but can’t vote for them even when logged in as there is no visible vote button on some phones.

3. In desktop, clicking Vote doesn't change the text to Voted, so you don't even know if it worked. (It makes a very subtle change to the icon, but it is too subtle to the point that it isn’t a discoverable visual cue at all.

4. The “Top Ideas” and “Hot Ideas” options serve up the exact same list.

5. When searching, clicking on one of the 'initial' search results then hitting the back button doesn't return you to the original search terms. You lose your search term and must reenter it.

6. "View More" only lets you see the titles of one or two of the results at a time.

7. The redesign does nothing to address “Idea Forking”. Search doesn't show you the # of votes that each one of the forked ideas has. People keep adding the same idea over and over because Ideas does just a bad job of bubbling the most voted similar ideas to the top.

8. I personally cannot see the Ideas site in Chrome or Edge…it just doesn’t render for me. (It did for a time, but it was incredibly slow in Edge). Works fine in Firefox for me. Other users may be similarly impacted.

9. The policy change to only allowing those with organizational accounts to vote has led to what I term “Vote Deflation”: The most popular ideas were voted for when *anyone* can vote. But now, only a *select few* can vote. Meaning the position of the top N pages of ideas is now effectively set in stone. Earlier popular ideas now have an unassailable lead.

Administrator on 30 Sep 2021 21:22:15

Great feedback.  We have some of these coming very soon, and I am adding a couple of great items mentioned on the backlog.  Fixes for the mobile voting will be rolled out soon.

Comments (14)
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on 30 Sep 2021 21:00:56

RE: Fix the redesigned Power BI site

"Other" is a catchall. "PowerQuery" is a revolution. It deserves its own category.

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on 30 Sep 2021 21:00:03

RE: Fix the redesigned Power BI site

You have a forum for Power BI Service at https://ideas.powerbi.com/forums/595933-power-bi-service but not the other platforms (which are categories). Please add forums for other platforms because I can't filter my search for an existing idea within a specific category. Thanks.

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on 30 Sep 2021 21:00:03

RE: Fix the redesigned Power BI site

If Desktop is the place for UI/UX improvements, call that out in the Category title. Change it from Desktop to "Desktop-UI/UX"

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Didier TERRIEN on 30 Jun 2021 08:58:33

RE: Fix the redesigned Power BI site

Most voted ideas are not always the most valuable. As less voted ideas are not easily visible, their votes grow slowly.

Allow ideas categories. It will be easier to filter ideas for searching and analytics purpose. This will also help finding duplicates.
Users can even set their priorities by categories so votes will not be the only way to attract your attention.

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Jeffrey "Measure-Driven" Weir on 21 Jun 2021 10:07:07

RE: Fix the redesigned Power BI site

Can you also change the way that the Ideas site turns a human-readable search string into something like %26quot%3BCalc+Group%26quot%3B after you push Enter?

Nobody should be exposed to something like that.

And some kind of "Advanced Search" section wouldn't go amiss either.

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Nicky van Vroenhoven on 10 Jun 2021 13:16:57

RE: Fix the redesigned Power BI site

While Jeffrey's point 1 has actually been solved (so login after following a URL to an idea redirects you to the page you were on previously), I agree with all the other points, except 8! In Chrome it works good for me for example.

On the organizational account point 9: I'd like to add that I lost all my history of voting and ideas I created/contributed to after logging in with my org account. This account was actually the same as I used previously..

In the mean time, a few different people (Alex Powers and PowerBITips afaik) made some reports extracting all the info from this site and put it in a PBI report to search, sort and do all kinds of things not possible here. While that is great work, I'd love to see those features in this site.
Also tagging questions as Wyn said is a good idea. I don't like the idea of splitting up sites for different topics, let's just keep everything in one place for the sake of clarity.

Editing ideas and comments is also a must.

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Power BI User on 10 Jun 2021 12:43:49

RE: Fix the redesigned Power BI site

In my experience, it doesn't work on mobile. I can't vote in ideas using mobile.

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Wyn Hopkins on 10 Jun 2021 11:15:42

RE: Fix the redesigned Power BI site

Ability to edit a comment would be nice too :)

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Wyn Hopkins on 10 Jun 2021 11:14:45

RE: Fix the redesigned Power BI site

Agree with previous post, especially Imke's "I’d like to be able to filter search results and have an easy way to refine my search."

Plus here's 2 more thoughts:

Posting an idea should allow the inclusion of images (screenshots)

On the mobile view the Submit Idea option is at the bottom of the screen ( at least on the iPhone). I only found it because I was determined to find it

Being able to tag and search ideas with things like "Power Query:", "DAX", "Desktop UI", "Visuals", "Dataflow" would be helpful.

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Just Blindbaek on 10 Jun 2021 06:04:57

RE: Fix the redesigned Power BI site

I support all the great feedback from Jeffrey and Imke.

PLEASE but in some efford and fix all these issues, so we can come back to a state where we can use this site again.