Guide section 26 of 31

Common Anti-Patterns

Anti-pattern	Why it fails
Designing Power BI as a website	Creates unsupported layout/state expectations.
Excessive custom visuals	Adds governance, performance and maintenance risk.
Too many visuals per page	Dilutes the primary question and increases query/render cost.
Duplicated filters	Creates ambiguous scope and wastes space.
Hidden active filter context	Makes users distrust or misread results.
Inconsistent drill behavior	Forces relearning and causes navigation errors.
Excessive / overlapping bookmarks	Creates brittle state logic and selected-state confusion.
Pixel-perfect Figma beyond Power BI capability	Shifts design debt to developers and causes late compromise.
Rebuilding native features unnecessarily	Loses familiar behavior and maintainability.
Unique solution per report	Prevents scale and governance.
Charts where a table communicates better	Reduces precision for lookup/detail tasks.
Dashboard without a clear analytical question	Turns the page into a metric dump.
Color-only status	Fails accessibility and weakens comprehension.
Pie chart for time series	Uses the wrong visual encoding for ordered change.
Arbitrary category order	Hides ranking or logical sequence.
Tooltips for essential information	Makes critical content undiscoverable/inaccessible.
Using bookmarks as an application framework	Overcomplicates a report's state model.
Assuming desktop canvas will print cleanly	Produces poor A4/PDF output.
Assuming mobile is automatic responsive reflow	Creates unreadable phone experiences.
Treating Nudge/Power UI as new runtime capability	Confuses design/standardization layers with Power BI itself.
Treating project preference as a platform limitation	Prevents justified exceptions and misinforms teams.