Align the Amazon QuickSight UI with your organization’s brand

Amazon QuickSight is a fully managed, cloud-centered business intelligence (BI) service that makes it straightforward to connect to your data, create interactive dashboards, and share these with tens of thousands of users, either within the QuickSight interface or embedded in software as a service (SaaS) applications or web portals.

We heard that customers wanted a user-friendly, self-service way to create a branded analytics environment that aligns with your organizational identity and seamlessly integrates QuickSight with the look and feel of your application. We are launching a self-service brand customization feature in QuickSight that allows AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) administrators to align the analytics interface of QuickSight with your organization’s branding. This creates a cohesive look and feel that aligns with your organization’s identity. Brand customization includes customization of your logo, favorite icon, and color scheme used for QuickSight screen elements. The custom branding gets applied at the account level and across all QuickSight non-administrative pages, as well as schedules, alerts and other email notifications.

This launch also supports APIs for managing your brands, including creating, updating, listing, and deleting, which allows administrators to automate brand configuration management. Administrators and developers can programmatically manage brands in their account.

In this post, we show how to configure and manage custom brands in your QuickSight account so you can present a branded analytics environment that aligns with your organizational identity to your end-users.

IAM policy

The QuickSight self-service brand customization feature is available for QuickSight admins with relevant IAM permissions. The following IAM policy allows access to the configuration settings in brand customization:

{
    “Version”: “2012-10-17”,
    “Statement”: [
        {
            “Effect”: “Allow”,
            “Action”: [          
                “quicksight:CreateBrand”
                “quicksight:UpdateBrand”
                “quicksight:DescribeBrand”
                “quicksight:DescribeBrandPublishedVersion”
                “quicksight:UpdateBrandPublishedVersion”
                “quicksight:DeleteBrand”
                “quicksight:ListBrands”
                “quicksight:UpdateBrandAssignment”
                “quicksight:DescribeBrandAssignment”
                “quicksight:DeleteBrandAssignment”                
            ],
            “Resource”: “*”
        }
    ]
}

APIs

Custom brands can be managed using the following public APIs:

• CreateBrand
• UpdateBrand
• DescribeBrand
• DescribeBrandPublishedVersion
• UpdateBrandPublishedVersion
• DeleteBrand
• ListBrands
• UpdateBrandAssignment
• DescribeBrandAssignment
• DeleteBrandAssignment

Solution overview

Let’s consider a fictional company, AnyCompany, which is an independent software vendor (ISV) that provides services to thousands of customers across the globe. QuickSight is used by AnyCompany for providing BI and analytics solutions. Previously, AnyCompany’s authors could create an aligned experience for their reader dashboards (using themes) but couldn’t do the same for an embedded console experience. AnyCompany’s marketing team has published a brand guide and their QuickSight administrator wants to make sure the QuickSight application and email notifications are themed in accordance with the brand guide.

Add a brand

To access the new QuickSight asset management feature and add a new brand, complete the following steps:

1. On the QuickSight console, navigate to the user menu and choose Manage QuickSight.

2. In the navigation pane, choose Customize application.

The landing page will present a list of previously created brands. You can choose the options menu (three vertical dots) in the Actions column of the brands if you want to publish, unpublish, edit, or delete an existing brand.

3. To add a new brand, choose Add brand.

4. Enter a brand name and description.

5. Replace the QuickSight logo with your desired logo by choosing Replace image on the options menu (three vertical dots) for Primary.

6. Replace the favorite icon with your logo icon by choosing Replace image on the options menu (three vertical dots) for Favicon.

7. Chose Save.

8. Choose Theme in the navigation pane to choose your application theme colors.

9. On the Theme Settings page, use the square color icon in each section to configure your QuickSight application with your brand colors.

All colors come in pairs of background and foreground colors. The foreground colors are meant to specifically appear above their matching background color. For a list of all parts of the application that can be configured with custom colors, see Amazon QuickSight Brand Customization.

10. After you configure the colors, choose Save.

11. Chose Back to Customize Application to see the newly created brand in the list.

You can also choose to publish the brand from this page by choosing Publish.

12. Choose Publish on the menu icon (three vertical dots) in the Actions column of the brand to publish.

The published custom brand is reflected in the QuickSight application in both embedded and non-embedded interfaces. Additionally, schedules, alerts, and share notification emails will reflect your custom logo and colors.

The following examples illustrate some of the QuickSight interfaces after applying a custom brand.

The following screenshot shows a custom landing page.

The following screenshot shows a custom analysis editor.

Conclusion

With the application customization feature in QuickSight, you can now create a branded analytics environment that aligns with your organizational identity. For enterprises, this helps with establishing brand coherency and a consistent look and feel for users. For ISVs, it helps with seamlessly integrating QuickSight into the look and feel of the application.

Try out the application customization feature, and share your feedback and questions in the comments. For more information, refer to Amazon QuickSight Brand Customization.

About the Author

Mayank Agarwal is a product manager for Amazon QuickSight, AWS’ cloud-native, fully managed BI service. He focuses on embedded analytics and developer experience. He started his career as an embedded software engineer developing handheld devices. Prior to QuickSight he was leading engineering teams at Credence ID, developing custom mobile embedded device and web solutions using AWS services that make biometric enrollment and identification fast, intuitive, and cost-effective for Government sector, healthcare and transaction security applications.