Collect user feedback

With BI Pixie you can collect feedback from your BI audience, and analyze their satisfaction beside their engagement. To collect feedback, BI Pixie adds feedback controls to the reports you choose.

A Power BI report shown before and after BI Pixie adds Pixies. The report on the right has thumbs up and thumbs down feedback buttons in its header, highlighted with a callout saying BI Pixie can add a feedback control to collect user feedback.

The feedback control that BI Pixie adds to your reports shows thumbs up and down, smile and frown, or custom icons of your choice.

This article describes how you turn on feedback collection and choose how the feedback control looks in your reports.

BI Pixie collects viewer user names only when include_user is true in bi_pixie_config.json, and it then keeps the email address, or a masked ID when MASK_USER_NAME is true on the function app. When include_user is false, it counts viewers by a masked IP address.

The Feedback Control

Once feedback collection is on, BI Pixie adds a slicer or a bookmark navigator at the top right corner of every report page, or of one page, depending on the feedback mode you choose, and collects user feedback through it. The control has two or three buttons: a left button for positive feedback, a right button for negative feedback, and an optional center button for neutral feedback.

Option 1: [thumbs up] [thumbs down]

Option 2: [smile] [frown]

Option 3: custom icons, by default [smile] [neutral] [frown]

When a report viewer selects one of the feedback buttons, BI Pixie sends the selection to your deployment of BI Pixie on Azure or Power Platform. The same viewer can select the feedback control several times. When you analyze the results, you can count either the last feedback per user and report, or every selection by the same user and report.

The feedback control comes in two modes: a slicer on every page of the report, or a bookmark navigator on the first page or another page you choose.

You choose the mode with the parameter collect_feedback_in_all_pages. When it is true, BI Pixie adds a feedback slicer to every page of the target reports. When it is false, BI Pixie adds a bookmark navigator to the first page, or to the page whose index you set in the collect_feedback_in_page parameter.

Collect Feedback in All Pages

When you set collect_feedback_in_all_pages to true, BI Pixie adds the feedback control to every page of your target reports.

For a feedback slicer on every page, BI Pixie adds a hidden calculated table, PixieFeedbackSlicer, to the report's local semantic model, unless the report has a live connection to an external semantic model. The table holds two rows, for the thumbs up and down or the smile and frown icons, and the slicer uses it as its data source. Step 3 below describes how to choose the icons.

With a feedback control on every page, you collect feedback for each page of your target Power BI reports. Because BI Pixie adds a table to your semantic model in this mode, we recommend refreshing the semantic model before you share the report with your audience.

When your target report has a live connection to an external semantic model, BI Pixie adds the feedback slicer only if that semantic model already has the PixieFeedbackSlicer table from an earlier run on another report connected to it. Otherwise, BI Pixie adds a bookmark navigator instead, and collects feedback on one page: the first page, or the page you set in the collect_feedback_in_page parameter. If you convert the live-connection report to composite mode in Power BI, BI Pixie can add the PixieFeedbackSlicer table to the local semantic model, and the feedback slicer to your pages.

Collect Feedback in One Page

When you set collect_feedback_in_all_pages to false, BI Pixie adds the feedback control to the first page as a bookmark navigator. To place the control on a different page, set the collect_feedback_in_page parameter to the position of that page, as described in Step 2 below.

Position Considerations

BI Pixie adds the feedback control at the top right corner of the target pages. To keep the control from overlapping other visuals in that corner, we recommend these steps:

After the first run, open the report in Power BI Desktop and review the pages with the feedback control: every page when BI Pixie added a slicer, or the first or chosen page when it added a bookmark navigator.
If the feedback control overlaps other visuals, rearrange the visuals and move the feedback control where you want it.
Save the report and publish it.
The next time you run BI Pixie on the report, BI Pixie keeps the feedback control in its new position.
Keep the feedback collection settings unchanged between runs, unless you first remove the feedback controls in clean_only mode.

Note: To change the feedback control settings, for example from smile and frown icons to thumbs up and down, or from a bookmark navigator on one page to slicers on every page, first run BI Pixie Desktop (bi-pixie.exe) in clean_only mode to remove every feedback control, and then run it again with the new settings.

Set Up User Feedback Collection

BI Pixie Desktop keeps its two configuration files, bi_pixie_config.json and bi_pixie_config_details.json, in its target folder, which by default is the folder that holds bi-pixie.exe. BI Pixie creates both files the first time you run bi-pixie.exe, as described in Add Pixies to your reports.

To collect user feedback in every target report, open the global configuration file, bi_pixie_config.json.

To collect user feedback in some reports only, or to use different settings per report, open bi_pixie_config_details.json.

Important Note: To change any feedback setting on reports that already have Pixies with feedback collection, first clean the reports by running BI Pixie Desktop in clean_only mode with this setting:

"clean_only": true

After the clean_only run completes, you can change the feedback collection settings as described in this section. To add the Pixies back, set clean_only to false before you run BI Pixie on the target reports again.

Step 1: Enable Feedback Collection

Feedback collection is off by default. To turn it on, set the collect_feedback_enabled field to true under the collect_feedback parameter:

"collect_feedback": {
  "collect_feedback_enabled": true,
  ...
}

Step 2: All pages (Slicer) vs. one page (Bookmark Navigator)

To add a slicer to every page of the target reports, set collect_feedback_in_all_pages as follows:

"collect_feedback": {
  ...
  "collect_feedback_in_all_pages": true,
  ...
}

To add a bookmark navigator to the first page of the target reports, set collect_feedback_in_all_pages as follows:

"collect_feedback": {
  ...
  "collect_feedback_in_all_pages": false,
  ...
}

By default, BI Pixie adds the bookmark navigator to the first page. To place it on a different page, set the collect_feedback_in_page parameter to that page's number:

"collect_feedback": {
  "collect_feedback_in_page": 2
}

Step 3: Choose Your Feedback Icons

The feedback control can use one of these icon sets:

Thumbs Up/Down Icons: To use thumbs up and thumbs down icons, set use_icons_thumbs_up_down to true.

"collect_feedback": {
  ...
  "use_icons_thumbs_up_down": true
}

Smile/Frown Icons: To use smile, neutral, and frown icons, set use_icons_smile_frown to true. When use_icons_thumbs_up_down is also true, BI Pixie ignores this parameter.

"collect_feedback": {
  ...
  "use_icons_thumbs_up_down": false,
  "use_icons_smile_frown": true
}

Custom Icons: To use your own icons, specify them under use_icons_other, with one icon each for positive, neutral, and negative feedback.

"collect_feedback": {
  ...
  "use_icons_thumbs_up_down": false,
  "use_icons_smile_frown": false,
  "use_icons_other": {
    "icon_positive": "...",
    "icon_neutral": "...",
    "icon_negative": "..."
  }
}

Step 4: Define Additional Settings

Tooltip Label: The feedback control carries a question mark icon, shown below. When report viewers point to it, a tooltip shows a message you choose, such as a request for feedback.

The thumbs up and thumbs down feedback buttons in a report header, with a question mark icon below them whose tooltip asks, Is this report helpful?

To choose the message in the feedback control's tooltip, set the tooltip_label parameter.

"collect_feedback": {
  ...
  "tooltip_label": "Is this report helpful?",
  ...
}

BI Pixie hides the neutral button by default, whether the feedback control is a slicer or a bookmark navigator. To include the neutral button, set hide_neutral_icon to false:

"collect_feedback": {
  ...
  "hide_neutral_icon": false,
  ...
}

By default, BI Pixie names the feedback control "BI Pixie Feedback Selector". Report authors see that name in the Selection pane when they edit the report. You can change the name with the feedback_selector_visual_name parameter. To change this parameter on reports that already have Pixies, run clean_only first, so that BI Pixie can remove the old feedback controls from the report during the next run.

Optional: Optimize Existing Bookmark Navigators

When the feedback control is a bookmark navigator, BI Pixie adds three bookmarks to your target reports and groups them. You can name the bookmark group:

"collect_feedback": {
  ...
  "bookmark_group": "Feedback Selector",
  ...
}

If your reports have ungrouped bookmarks, report viewers would see all of them in the new feedback control beside the feedback bookmarks. To keep only the feedback bookmarks in the feedback control, every ungrouped bookmark has to be grouped and kept out of the feedback bookmark navigator. When you turn on the optimize_bookmark_navigators parameter, BI Pixie groups the ungrouped bookmarks for you.

"collect_feedback": {
  ...
  "optimize_bookmark_navigators": true,
  "unassigned_bookmarks_group_name": "Grouped Bookmarks"
}

When optimize_bookmark_navigators is set to true, BI Pixie does the following:

Creates a new group for ungrouped bookmarks: BI Pixie places every bookmark in the report that is not already in a group into a new group, "Grouped Bookmarks", so that your existing bookmark navigators stay separate from the new feedback bookmarks. To name the group, change the unassigned_bookmarks_group_name parameter.
Assigns the new group to bookmark navigators that have none: BI Pixie finds the bookmark navigators that have no group assigned and assigns them the new group, so that they do not show the feedback bookmarks.
Adds the feedback bookmarks to the feedback control: BI Pixie adds the feedback bookmarks to the feedback control as their own group, so that no other bookmarks show in it.

How feedback selections are counted

With a bookmark navigator, a report viewer can select both the positive and the negative button in the same session. In the BI Pixie Dashboard, you can analyze every selection, or only the last selection per user and report.

A report viewer's feedback selection stays in the slicer or bookmark navigator until they change it or reset it. With slicers as the feedback control, BI Pixie collects the selection in the slicers each time the page loads. In the BI Pixie Dashboard, BI Pixie therefore counts both the first time a viewer gave the feedback and every later page load that carried it. To find the first date a viewer gave the feedback, you can build new visuals on the Feedback table.