Creating Mobile BI

Tips for Mobile Design

If you know that your dashboards will be viewed on mobile devices, consider the following guidelines.

Best Practice: Focus on what matters for a real-world use case. Keep it simple.

Visual Design Tips

Place the most important dashlet at the top left of the dashboard page.

Reports are displayed from left to right and top to bottom.

Design for thumbs. Make any filters easy to tap.

For increased usability and navigation, minimize the number of dashlets on a dashboard page.

Avoid legends and redundant labels that distract from the focus of the chart.

Consider reducing the size of large fonts that may take too much room on a small screen.

Think about zooming and when users would zoom in or out.

Design at a screen resolution of 1024px by 768px for best results on a tablet device.

On a phone device, KPIs, charts, and tables stack vertically for scrolling, with KPIs at the top.

Performance Tips

To achieve maximum performance on a mobile device, consider the following guidelines:

Use as many reports as absolutely required on a dashboard, and no more.

Use Visualizer reports. Visualizer has better support for offline viewing and is being optimized for faster load times.

Use Visualizer Turbo Charts for faster chart rendering. By default Turbo Charts are turned on in the mobile settings.

Keep the layout on one screen, above the dotted line in dashboard edit mode. (This is also called a "virtual page".)

Use low cardinality filters. Reduce the number of filter values that have to be downloaded. Providing only the relevant filter values also improves the user experience.

Use standard filters instead of embedded filters. Embedded filters take up more screen space and therefore take longer to render. If you do use embedded filters, limit them to only a few values.

Avoid using tables with more than 12 columns. Smaller tables load faster and do not require scrolling.

Avoid chartjunk and use the best chart for the data. Most analysis can be performed with line, column, bar, and scatter charts.

Teach your users how to sync the dashboards while online and use them offline.

Enable and use Delay Charting to apply and select filters before a Dashboard is rendered, saving you time and improving mobile performance. You can enable/ disable Delay Charting on each Dashboard when in Edit mode so that the Dashboard filters, images, buttons, and text fields are displayed before the Dashboard is fully rendered.

User Management

Account Administrators manage user access to Birst Mobile from the Birst Admin User Management window.

By default, users do not have access and will see a message that says to contact their Account Administrator. Account Administrators can set online-only access, or both online and offline. See Granting Access to Birst Mobile.

Tip: Users also need access to Dashboards 2.0. See Granting Access to Dashboards 2.0.

Tips for SAML Authentication:

  • You can provision users for Birst Mobile with birst.mobileStatus. See User Provisioning with SAML
  • If the Birst account has more than one active SAML configuration, Mobile SSO for iOS and Android devices will not work. Account Administrators can disable SAML configurations from the Account Settings page.

Securing Birst Mobile

Security is an important consideration when business data is used on mobile devices. All data is encrypted on the device, and in addition to the standard login, a passcode PIN is required for added security. For some devices, TouchID can be enabled.

Important: If a device is lost or stolen, the Account Administrator can remotely wipe (erase, delete) the data from the Birst Mobile app.  See Wiping Data from Birst Mobile.

User sessions expire every 24 hours and at such time the user must login again.

Offline Mode

Birst Mobile supports browsing dashboards, with full support for filtering, drilling, and using interactive visuals, while the app is not connected to the internet. To enable this functionality, the dashboards and data are stored in a cache. While syncing and using offline mode is easy for business users, as a dashboard developer you may be interested in the details about caching and offline mode.

Offline mode works like a cache on a web browser. As a user browses, filters, and drills through their dashboards and reports, Birst Mobile caches the following:

  • the data
  • the queries used to generate the data
  • the state of all report visualizations on the dashboards

When the app goes offline, Birst Mobile can use the cache to generate the same views of the dashboards, with the same fully interactive visuals and filters. If the user did not previously browse a report or set a filter while online, it will not be available offline. If this occurs, a message informs the user that the view is not available offline.

Best Practice: The simple advice for business users is: If you want to see it while offline, first browse it while online.

Once the app goes back online, users can re-sync their dashboards to pick up the latest data. The Sync buttons at the dashboard, collection, and space levels:

  • Rerun all cached queries
  • Generate updated views of each report and dashboard

Depending on how many views have been cached, the sync operation may take a bit of time. The app shows the Last Updated time for each dashboard in the collection browser and Offline Manager.

Settings for Offline

By default offline caching is disabled. You want to tell your business users how to enable it.

The Offline Cache controls are available in the app Settings.

Important: Settings expire when the user logs out of the app.

Users can set the duration of the Offline Cache, from 1 Day to Never Expire. For all except Never Expire, the cache is deleted at the specified interval. Unless you have specific reasons, the setting that is most user-friendly is to Never Expire.

Online Refresh

How often the data refreshes while a device is online is controlled by the Online Cache setting. The app uses the cached data and dashboards rather than rerunning the queries every time there is a user interaction.

By default this setting is 5 minutes, meaning that the app will refresh every 5 minutes. This is a good setting for obtaining up-to-date data, however if your dashboards don't update that frequently your users can increase the setting to better fit their needs. Refreshing less frequently can improve performance for larger collections.

Next Steps

After you have designed your dashboards, enable your business users.