Best Of

Author: Arjun Gandhi, Certified Master Anaplanner with over a decade of experience leading enterprise Anaplan implementations across industries.

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“If your dashboard doesn’t tell users what to do within 10 seconds, it’s already failed.”

🧭 Introduction: Why UX design in Anaplan matters

Anaplan’s UX is more than just the surface layer of your model — it’s the gateway to planning adoption, collaboration, and decision-making. Whether it’s a CFO reviewing revenue trends or a territory planner inputting quotas, your dashboards are the interface through which users interact with your logic, assumptions, and outcomes.

Despite powerful back-end models, poor UX can cause users to:

• Feel overwhelmed by too much data
  
• Make errors due to unclear inputs
  
• Miss insights due to poor visual structure
  
• Abandon the tool altogether
  

As a Master Anaplanner with over ten years of experience deploying and scaling enterprise models, I’ve seen one truth hold everywhere:
“If your dashboard doesn’t tell users what to do within 10 seconds, it’s already failed.”

This guide is divided into two parts, and walks through essential UX best practices in Anaplan — covering layout, inputs, interactivity, and visual clarity. You’ll get practical guidance with direct links to official documentation so you can apply changes immediately, with confidence. Look for part two later this week.

I’ll share proven UX best practices from over a decade of real-world model building and enterprise enablement. Whether you’re an experienced model builder or just starting to design dashboards, these tips will help you deliver smart, scalable, and beautiful user experiences in Anaplan.

In part one, I cover:

1. Choosing between Boards, Worksheets, and Reports
2. Optimizing layouts with page sections and context
3. Field cards, descriptions, and instructional guidance
4. Formatting to focus user attention

Ready to build dashboards your users will love? Let’s begin.

🧱 Section 1: Choosing between Boards, Worksheets, and Reports

Anaplan’s UX offers three types of pages: Boards, Worksheets, and Reports. Each serves a unique purpose and should be used intentionally depending on your audience and the type of interaction required.

🔍 When to Use Each

• Use a Board when you want to deliver insights at a glance — ideal for decision-makers. Boards let you combine KPIs, charts, and narrative to tell a story or track performance.
  
• Use a Worksheet when your user needs to interact deeply with data — think detailed forecasting, manual overrides, or list-based planning. Worksheets offer filtering, context panes, and editable grids.
  
• Use a Report when you need a clean, printable or presentation-friendly output — great for monthly business reviews or board decks.

Additional resources in Anapedia:

📘 Learn more about Boards
📘 Explore Worksheets
📘 Create Reports

🧩 Section 2: Structuring pages with sections, context, and categories

Designing a useful UX page goes beyond just placing cards. The structure and context of your page determine how easily your users can process information and complete planning tasks. To optimize user flow, you should strategically use page sections, context selectors, and application page categories.

✅ Use page sections to group content with purpose

Dividing content into distinct page sections — like “Top KPIs,” “Input Forecast,” or “Review Assumptions”—creates natural breakpoints and focuses user attention.

This modular structure allows you to:

• Visually separate decision points
  
• Simplify navigation across content types
  
• Reinforce logical planning flow
  

Best practices:

• Add only what’s necessary; don’t create clutter with unused section space.
  
• Keep each section to a single use case — don’t mix inputs, outputs, and actions.
  
• Use clear titles to guide the user's thought process.
  

Steps to add a section:

1. Enter Designer Mode on a UX page.
2. Hover between cards and click “Add Section”.
3. Label the section meaningfully and begin adding relevant cards.

Additional resource in Anapedia: 📘 Create a page in the User Experience

🗂️ Leverage Application page categories

When creating pages, Anaplan allows you to assign them a category to reflect the type of planning activity they support. This helps both model builders and end users quickly understand a page’s function in the broader application.

Common page categories:

• Planning: for day-to-day data entry and driver adjustment
  
• Reporting: for visualization and KPI tracking
  
• Review: for historical comparison or what-if outcomes
  
• Workflow: for submission, approvals, or process control

Categorizing pages:

• Helps with sorting and navigation inside the app
  
• Clarifies intent for the user before they open the page
  
• Reinforces UX consistency in large applications
  

Recommendation: Always set a category when building a page — it shows up in the app’s side navigation and improves clarity at scale.

🎯 Configure context selectors thoughtfully

Context selectors filter content by dimension — like Region, Product, or Time — and appear at the top of the page. These should be configured to simplify, not overwhelm.

Best practices:

• Minimize selectors to those that matter for this page
  
• Fix dimensions when possible (e.g., always show “Current Year”)
  
• Synchronize selectors across cards so users don’t need to reselect
  
• Clearly label selectors, especially if multiple are present
  

Additional resource in Anapedia: 📘 Configure context selectors in apps and pages

💬 Section 3: Field cards, descriptions, and instructional guidance

Even the best dashboards fail when users don’t know what to enter, where, or why it matters. That’s where field cards, descriptions, and embedded guidance become essential. This section is about turning your UX pages from passive displays into interactive, intuitive experiences.

📝 Use field cards for targeted inputs

Field cards are a powerful, flexible way to surface inputs — especially when you want a single value editable directly on a board or worksheet.

Use cases include:

• Adjusting an assumption like “Growth %” or “Discount Rate”
  
• Setting scenario toggles or flags
  
• Capturing simple annotations (e.g., “Manager Comment”)

Why field cards work well:

• They’re compact and visually distinct
  
• You can add data validation logic behind them
  
• They prevent accidental grid edits by isolating the input
  

Additional resource in Anapedia: 📘 How to use a field card

💡 Add descriptions to guide user action

Field cards, KPIs, grids, and charts can all include card descriptions—short text that appears on hover or next to the card title. These can serve as inline help, task instructions, or policy references.

Example:
“Use this input to set Q4 price assumptions. Defaults pulled from Actuals Q3.”

Best practices:

• Be clear and concise (1–2 sentences max)
  
• Use descriptions to answer “what am I supposed to do here?”
  
• Standardize tone across all cards for professionalism
  

Additional resource in Anapedia: 📘 How to configure a field card (includes description setup)

🧠 Bonus tip: Instructional-only sections

If your page contains advanced logic, consider adding a dedicated info panel or instructional section using text or field cards. This reinforces the model’s business logic and helps with onboarding new users.

You can even include:

• Model assumptions
  
• Version control notes
  
• Hyperlinks to SOPs or external docs
  

🎨 Section 4: Formatting to focus user attention

Great dashboards don’t just display information — they guide the eye and signal what matters. With the right formatting, users can instantly identify what needs attention, where to act, and how to interpret results without getting lost in a sea of numbers.

🟥 Apply conditional formatting to highlight decisions

Conditional formatting allows model builders to visually emphasize data based on logic—like alerting users when a forecast exceeds budget or a metric is outside its tolerance range.

When to use it:

• Flag high/low variances (e.g., over 10%)
  
• Color-code input status (e.g., incomplete = red)
  
• Surface issues like missing assumptions or late submissions
  

Best practices:

• Avoid color overload: limit to 2–3 conditions per card
  
• Use consistent logic across pages (e.g., always use red for errors)
  
• Preview conditional logic in context with real data

Additional resource in Anapedia: 📘 Apply conditional formatting

📊 Style grid rows, columns, and summaries for clarity

Grids are one of the most frequently used components in Anaplan UX — make sure they’re clean and scannable.

Styling options include:

• Bold row headers to distinguish hierarchies (like regions or products)
  
• Alternate row shading to improve readability
  
• Distinct summary rows with border lines or highlight formatting
  

This kind of styling helps users:

• Differentiate parent vs child rows
  
• Quickly find totals and key calculations
  
• Avoid accidental edits by identifying read-only rows
  

Additional resource in Anapedia: 📘 Set the style of grid card rows and column headers

🖍 Quick formatting wins

• Use pale yellow or soft blue as background for editable cells
  
• Style read-only data with light gray or muted formatting
  
• Place important KPIs in their own card with bold, large font
  
• Separate input sections from output sections visually on the page
  

📌 Pro tip: Always test formatting in dark mode and light mode to ensure accessibility for all users.

Conclusion of part one

Stay tuned for part two, in which I’ll cover:

• Dynamic Cell Access (DCA) and visibility control
  
• Scaling UX with consistency and reuse
  
• Mobile optimization and responsive design
  
• Polaris UX considerations and exclusive capabilities
  
• User feedback and iterative UX improvement
  

Questions? Leave a comment!

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