Author: Arjun Gandhi, Certified Master Anaplanner with over a decade of experience leading enterprise Anaplan implementations across industries.
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.
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.
If you missed Part 1, you can find it here. It covers four ideas:
1. Choose between Boards, Worksheets, and Reports
2. Optimize layout with page sections and context
3. Field cards, descriptions, and instructional guidance
4. Formatting to focus user attention
In Part 2, we’ll cover ideas five through nine:
5. Dynamic Cell Access (DCA) and Visibility Control
6. Scaling UX with Consistency and Reuse
7. Mobile Optimization and Responsive Design
8. Polaris UX Considerations and Exclusive Capabilities
9. User Feedback and Iterative UX Improvement
Let’s get started.
🔐 Section 5: Dynamic Cell Access (DCA) and visibility control
An intuitive UX isn’t just about what users see, it’s about what they shouldn’t see or touch. That’s where Dynamic Cell Access (DCA) plays a critical role. It allows model builders to define exactly when and where users can read, write, or hide specific data points — all based on logic within the model.
🔒 What is Dynamic Cell Access?
DCA lets you control cell-level visibility and edit-ability using Boolean logic (TRUE/FALSE values). Rather than blocking access to an entire module or list, you can tailor it with surgical precision.
This is vital for:
- Preventing accidental edits to actuals or locked periods
- Displaying override inputs only when needed
- Securing sensitive values by user role or approval status
Example scenarios:
- A field is editable only if the current version = “Forecast” and a “Planning Open” flag is TRUE
- A manager sees override fields only after the analyst completes their input
- Read-only summaries are shown, but input cells are hidden from unauthorized users
Additional resource in Anapedia: 📘 Dynamic Cell Access (DCA) – Anaplan Documentation
🧠 Why DCA matters for UX
When applied correctly, DCA enhances the user experience by:
- Reducing noise: Hiding unnecessary or irrelevant inputs
- Protecting data integrity: Preventing changes to finalized values
- Clarifying responsibilities: Users see only what they are expected to interact with
Combined with conditional formatting and card descriptions, DCA enables intelligent UX that adapts to context, decision logic, and user roles.
Best practices:
- Name DCA line items clearly (e.g.,
Write Access - Forecast Only)
- Test thoroughly across roles and versions
- Pair DCA with visual cues (e.g., gray formatting for locked fields)
🚀 Section 6: Scaling UX with consistency and reuse
As Anaplan implementations expand across various use cases, models, and business units, maintaining a consistent and scalable UX becomes essential. A well-designed UX not only enhances user experience but also simplifies maintenance and promotes adoption.
🧩 Standardize UX patterns
Consistency across dashboards ensures that users can navigate and interact with different pages without confusion. Establishing standard UX patterns helps in:
- Card layouts: Maintain uniformity in placing inputs, outputs, and KPIs.
- Naming conventions: Use clear and consistent naming for pages and cards.
- Context selectors: Position selectors consistently across pages.
- Section titles: Use standardized titles for similar sections across different pages.
- Formatting styles: Apply consistent styles for fonts, colors, and grid layouts.
Implementing these patterns facilitates easier onboarding for new users and streamlines the development process for model builders.
🧠 Reuse pages and templates
Leveraging existing pages as templates can significantly reduce development time and ensure consistency. You can duplicate pages to:
- Create similar planning cycles (e.g., Q1, Q2, Q3 forecast input pages).
- Develop role-specific views (e.g., Manager vs. Analyst dashboards).
- Replicate layouts for new models that follow a similar structure.
How to duplicate a page:
- Navigate to the app containing the page you want to duplicate.
- Hover over the desired page and select the ellipsis (...).
- Choose Duplicate page from the dropdown menu.
Additional resource in Anapedia: 📘 Duplicate a page
🔄 Move pages between Apps
Organizing pages within appropriate apps enhances clarity and user navigation. Moving pages allows you to restructure your UX as your organizational needs evolve.
How to move a page:
- Open the app containing the page you wish to move.
- Hover over the page and select the ellipsis (...).
- Choose Move page and select the destination app.
Additional resource in Anapedia: 📘 Move a page
🛠 Design for maintenance
A scalable UX is one that can be easily maintained and updated. Consider the following practices:
- Group cards by data source: Organize cards based on their source modules for easier updates.
- Include "Last Updated" indicators: Display timestamps to inform users about the freshness of data.
- Implement a UX QA checklist: Regularly review pages for consistency, functionality, and performance.
👥 Empower power users
Design your UX to enable power users to:
- Filter and explore data: Allow users to customize views to their needs.
- Conduct what-if analyses: Provide tools for scenario planning and forecasting.
- Navigate seamlessly: Ensure intuitive navigation between dashboards and detailed views.
By creating a user-centric UX, you foster an environment where users can confidently interact with the platform and derive actionable insights.
📱 Section 7: Mobile optimization and responsive design
As business becomes increasingly mobile, users expect their planning tools to work seamlessly on the go. Whether it's a sales executive reviewing pipeline or a regional planner entering forecast updates from the field, Anaplan's UX must adapt.
While the Anaplan Mobile App provides responsive rendering, your design choices still directly affect usability across devices.
📐 Design with mobility in mind
Mobile screens demand simplicity, stackable layouts, and minimal interaction friction. You should build UX pages that anticipate tap-based navigation and tighter screen real estate.
Design guidelines for mobile-friendly pages:
- 🧱 Use vertical layout orientation: Stack cards logically from summary KPIs → charts → inputs
- 👆 Avoid wide tables: Grids with horizontal scroll are hard to use on small screens
- 🔢 Minimize visual noise: Fewer sections and cards are better for scanability
- ✅ Prioritize read-only views: Editing is limited on mobile — design for consumption
Additional resource in Anapedia: 📘 Best practices for building UX for mobile
🧪 Test on multiple devices
Before publishing a new dashboard, validate the experience across form factors:
- 🧭 Use Page Designer's device preview to simulate tablet and phone
- 🧍♂️ Ask mobile-heavy users (sales, execs) to test interactions live
- 🔄 Consider creating mobile variants of key dashboards for performance and readability
🔄 Build for touch, not click
- Replace dropdowns with selectors
- Use charts or KPIs for quick views, rather than full grids
- Increase card spacing to allow easy tapping
Remember, your mobile dashboard should answer this question:
Can the user get what they need in under 15 seconds, without zooming or scrolling sideways?
✨ Section 8: Polaris UX considerations and exclusive capabilities
The Polaris Calculation Engine isn’t just a back-end performance upgrade — it opens up new possibilities for UX design. Polaris enables deeper, denser planning models without sacrificing speed, and offers exclusive features like zero suppression, which directly influence how users experience data.
If you're designing UX for a Polaris model, you can create cleaner, more responsive, and more powerful dashboards by leaning into what Polaris does best.
⚙️ What Polaris unlocks in UX
Here are some key capabilities in Polaris that enhance dashboard design:
Capability | UX advantage |
|---|
Zero suppression | Hides rows/columns with no data — automatically simplifies views |
High-dimensional modeling | Enables broader planning combinations (e.g., product x region x version) |
Faster sparse calculations | Lets you expose more granular inputs without sacrificing performance |
No need for fake hierarchies | Cleaner list structures = cleaner UX logic |
Additional resource in Anapedia: 📘 Polaris Calculation Engine overview
🧠 UX design best practices in Polaris
To get the most from Polaris in the UX layer:
- ✅ Use zero suppression: Automatically hide zero-value intersections to reduce scroll and noise. Additional resource in Anapedia: 📘 Suppress zeros in Polaris
- 🧱 Expose more granularity: Since Polaris handles sparsity efficiently, you can show more detailed views — like SKU-by-region — without performance penalty.
- 🔁 Avoid workarounds for hierarchies: Polaris lets you build natural, deep lists. This simplifies filtering and navigation in UX pages.
- 🔒 Leverage DCA without overhead: Polaris processes logic more efficiently, so you can apply cell-level controls (via DCA) even in large views.
✨ Example use case
In a traditional engine, exposing a 4-dimensional revenue planning grid would tank performance. In Polaris, you can build a page that shows Customer x Product x Region x Scenario, apply Zero Suppression, and still deliver real-time interaction.
🔄 Section 9: User feedback and iterative UX improvement
A great UX isn't just built — it's evolved. Your first version may meet the spec, but only real-world usage reveals where your dashboards shine or fall short. The best Anaplan teams treat UX as a living product, improving it based on ongoing feedback and usage patterns.
👂 Gather feedback from real users
Insightful feedback isn’t just about surveys, it’s about watching how users interact and where they hesitate or make errors. Bake feedback into your design cycle with these methods:
- 🎥 Observe real usage: Sit in on planning sessions or record walkthroughs
- 🧭 Ask simple questions: “What are you trying to do here?”, “What confused you?”
- 🗣️ Create feedback modules: Add comment fields on dashboards for in-app suggestions
- 📊 Use audit events to infer engagement: Review user activity logs to understand who’s interacting with what
Additional resource in Anapedia: 📘 Tracked User Activity Events (Audit)
♻️ Iterate like a UX product manager
UX is not a one-and-done activity. Use agile cycles to continuously release improvements:
- 🧹 Simplify interactions with each revision — fewer clicks, clearer steps
- 🆕 Label changes clearly: A “What’s New” card helps users reorient
- 📅 Schedule UX review cycles quarterly or biannually
- 🧪 Try A/B testing of page layouts or visual styles when usage is unclear
🛠 Use a UX QA checklist before going live
To reduce user frustration and rework, validate each page before release:
- Are all context selectors scoped appropriately?
- Do DCA rules behave correctly across roles?
- Is conditional formatting triggering as intended?
- Does the page render cleanly on mobile and tablet?
- Are labels, tooltips, and field descriptions present and helpful?
When feedback loops are tight and users feel heard, adoption goes up, errors go down, and the UX becomes an asset, not a bottleneck.
✅ Conclusion and wrap-up
A high-performing Anaplan model doesn’t succeed on logic alone — it succeeds when users engage, understand, and act. That’s the power of great UX. Whether you’re building for finance, supply chain, sales, or HR, your dashboards are the front line of planning.
Throughout this guide, we’ve explored how to:
- Choose the right page type (Boards, Worksheets, Reports)
- Structure content using page sections and context
- Make inputs intuitive with field cards and descriptions
- Drive clarity with conditional formatting and grid styling
- Control access and flow using DCA
- Build mobile-responsive pages for on-the-go decision-making
- Leverage Polaris-exclusive features like Zero Suppression
- Scale your UX with reuse and consistency
- Continuously improve with user feedback and audit data
“If your dashboard doesn’t tell users what to do within 10 seconds, it’s already failed.”
That quote captures it all: good UX isn’t optional — it’s how you turn planning models into business outcomes.
💡 Final tips from the field
As a Master Anaplanner who has worked with global enterprises for over a decade, here’s what I’ve learned:
- Treat UX like a product: it should evolve with user needs.
- Less is more: don’t overcrowd pages with logic or visuals.
- Design for how people work, not just how models calculate.
- Invest in UX early: it pays dividends in adoption and trust.
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👤 About the author
Arjun Gandhi is a certified Master Anaplanner with over 10 years of experience architecting, deploying, and enabling enterprise-wide planning solutions across industries. He specializes in large-scale UX design, connected planning strategy, and performance optimization.
