Your first dashboard, on paper

You now have everything needed to design a dashboard. Not to build one yet; that comes in later courses. Designing it first, on paper, is what separates a page people use from a page people ignore, and it takes ten minutes.

Step 1: Write the brief

Go back to the one-sentence test from the first episode and extend it to three lines.

• Reader: who will open this?
• Decision: what will they do differently because of it?
• Question: what do they need answered, in their own words?

For our cafés:

• Reader: the owner, every Monday morning.
• Decision: where to add or cut staff hours this week.
• Question: “Which cafés were busier or quieter than expected last week, and when?”

If you are tempted to add a second question, stop. A second question is a second page.

Step 2: Find the measures and dimensions

Underline the numbers and the labels in the question.

• Measures: number of orders, and orders expected (the target).
• Dimensions: café, day of week, hour of day.

That short list already tells you which tables you need: sales, a list of cafés, a calendar and a table of targets. You have not opened any software and you already know what to ask the data team for.

Step 3: Sketch three rows

Take a sheet of paper and divide it into three bands. Most good dashboards follow this order because it matches how people read: answer first, explanation second, detail last.

Top: the headline. One or two large numbers that answer the question at a glance. “Orders last week: 4,180. Expected: 3,900. Up 7%.”

Middle: the breakdown. The headline split by the dimension that explains it. Here, a bar for each café showing orders against expected, sorted by the size of the gap.

Bottom: the pattern. How it varies over time. Here, orders by day and hour, so the owner can see that Harbour was short on Saturday morning.

Draw boxes, not charts. Write in each box what it shows and which question it answers.

Step 4: Apply five rules

Check the sketch against these before anyone builds it.

1. One page, one question. Everything on the page helps answer it.
2. Most important at the top left. That is where the eye lands first.
3. Plain words. “Orders against expected”, not “Volume variance”.
4. Show the date. “Data to Sunday 8 March” somewhere visible.
5. Nothing extra. If a box does not help the decision, remove it.

Step 5: Test it in five seconds

Show the sketch to the reader, or to anyone, for five seconds and take it away. Ask what it was about and what they would do. If they can say, the design works. If they cannot, change the sketch. Changing paper is free.

What you can do now

In six short episodes you have covered the ideas that every BI tool is built on:

• what BI is for, and the test for a useful report
• how data sits in rows, columns and tables
• how measures and dimensions form every question
• how to read a chart without being misled
• where data comes from and why reports disagree
• how to design a page that answers one question

Where to go next

The natural next step is SQL for beginners: how to ask a database your own questions and pull exactly the rows your sketch needs. After that, the Power BI course turns the sketch into a working report.

Try it

Write a three-line brief for a report you would use every week, and sketch its three rows. Keep the paper. It is the first thing a good analyst will ask you for.