Authoring best practices

Learn more about what the best practices are for content creation in Analytics Content Hub.

Create initial design concept

Each application starts as a blank page and you must have an initial concept of how to design it. Build interactive pages that are according to the users needs. Identify the content that they need to achieve their goal, what is their level of experience, what data they need and how do they use it. With those details in mind, start designing your application. It's also a good practice to apply corporate colors to make the application more familiar to the users. If you decide to implement custom colors, save them as a color scheme. For more information, see Creating a custom color scheme.

Customize the login screen

If your application doesn't use SSO for log-ins, you can modify the appearance of the login screen to make it look more integrated with other organization systems. For more information, see Customizing the login page.

Use templates

You can create a template of your Analytics Content Hub application to create similar applications. Save the finished design and make it visible only for users with author or admin roles. When they create a new application, they can copy the template and then adjust it according to their needs.

Create custom author roles

If you use the same author role for every user, each author can edit all applications within the Analytics Content Hub. You can create custom author roles with individual access level to avoid such situations. To learn how to control capabilities for different roles, see Control capabilities for roles.

Use images as buttons

Buttons have some customization options, for example size, color, and icons. If they are not enough, you can use images as actionable objects. For more information, see Designer elements for authoring.

Create individual pages

If your application has users from different departments that require the same data, create an individual page for them instead of multiple pages with repeated content. For example, account executives and sales managers can use one page that is dedicated to sales data and visualizations.

Use corporate colors

Use custom colors to implement corporate colors and make the application look cohesive. You can use custom colors in reports, dashboards, and as an overall color scheme. For more information, see Creating a custom color scheme and Changing Analytics Content Hub color scheme.

Below image is an example of a corporate color palette and how it looks in Cognos Analytics report:

Decompose existing visualizations

Opt for using individual visuals instead of embedding entire dashboards or reports. For more information, see Display a specific PowerBI page, Hiding PowerBI report pages, and Selecting a specific visual from Qlik Sense sheet.

Use tile background images

You can use images as backgrounds of canvas or grid containers. For more information, see Designer elements for authoring.

Use filters

If you use images as backgrounds, you can apply filters, for example opacity, transparency, and saturation, to make them more subtle.

Create a landing or a welcome page

Create a landing page that blends with the corporate colors and explains what is the application purpose. It is an initial view of the application that users see. The lading page can contain contextual information about the application, content lanes, embedded videos, and visualizations. It provides necessary starting information for the users.

Below image is an example of how a landing page can look like:

Reuse content lanes

Each content lane has unique properties that should be consistent across all lanes in the application to help ensure identical layout. You can reuse content lanes by copying and pasting them on a new page. You can also adjust the properties of the copied content lanes. Below images show how you can copy a content lane and then change the Content Source and Display properties.

Important: The Content Source and Display properties should change from one element to another.

Create data stories

Data stories are pages that contain textual summaries and data analysis. They provide users with consistent narrative about the data so that they have the same understanding of different visualizations.

Below image shows an application page that does not use a data story. It gathers all visualizations on a single screen, which makes it difficult to focus on certain areas. There is no contextual information and the overall design might look cluttered, as there is very little whitespace between the elements.

Below image shows a transformed version of the previous unified visualization, but now it uses a data story for the structure. It contains a summary at the top part of the page. The slider is set to scroll down automatically every 6 seconds to give users enough time to consume information. It also adds movement and makes the page more dynamic. The page is divided into three sections, which makes the content easy to understand and consume.

Reuse pages from other applications

You can reuse pages from other applications in the Analytics Content Hub by following these steps:

1. Open the Designer and select the Import pages option from the menu. Locate the corresponding application and select the page that you need.
   
2. Click Import to create a copy of the page and add it to your application.