In addition to following good design guidelines, you also want to design your stories for optimal performance. In other words, when a user opens your story, or navigates to a page in your story, they should not be required to wait while the widgets render. Or, if they refresh the data in the story, it should not take long to update the data.
NoteKeep in mind that "long" is a very relative term. Different users will have different tolerances for what "long" means to them. "Long" could mean a few seconds or a few minutes. You must work with your users to determine what acceptable performance means to them.
Story Performance Guidelines
- In Model Preferences under Data and Performance, toggle on Optimize Story Building Performance. This prevents the automatic refresh of data during story design.
- Whenever possible, choose unbooked data in charts. This means that the software has to spend less time differentiating between booked and unbooked data.
- Avoid specifying Exception Aggregations in the Model and instead, use the restricted measures or calculation functionality or in your stories.
- When adding images to your pages, ensure that the images are sized for web and are smaller than 1MB. SVG vectors image files still look great at a small file size. If you can’t use an SVG image file, PNG image files perform better than JPG.
- To ensure performance when working with blended data, avoid creating linked dimensions on calculated dimensions. Keeping the number of models linked in each story at a minimum will also improve overall speed and performance.
- Limit the number of content-rich tiles on each page like maps or charts with a high volume of data points. Overloading your pages with dense information will make it harder for your viewers to consume and may slow load-time.
- Try designing your story using Responsive pages instead of Canvas or Grid pages. Responsive pages allow your story content to re-flow depending on the size of the screen it is being viewed on.
- For a Dimension with a large Hierarchy and an ALL node, it is recommended to use the chart drill capability for best performance.
- Be aware of progressive chart rendering, which enables chart widgets to display more quickly when a story is opened a subsequent time (within an hour). This setting is enabled by administrators.
- For Tables with large datasets, it is recommended to avoid Styling Rules.
- Enable the "High Performance" power plan (in your computer settings) if scrolling in tables is slow.