Level 1 · What is this dashboard for?

Every dashboard request hides a question: why does this page exist? Answer it before you choose a single visual, because the answer decides almost everything else.

What you are working in

This quiz runs in a practice page, not Power BI; Power BI Desktop runs only on Windows. The design choices are the same wherever you build. In Power BI Desktop, a good place to write the purpose down is the report itself: Insert → Text box under the title, one line saying who the page is for and what it helps them do, so the next person to edit it knows.

Three purposes

purpose	reader asks	refresh	typical page
Decision	“What should we do?”	as of a date	one question, a few KPIs compared, a conclusion
Monitoring	“Is anything wrong today?”	daily or more	current values against thresholds, exceptions highlighted
Exploration	“Why is this happening?”	as needed	slicers, drill-down, detail tables

They overlap less than people think. A monitoring page full of slicers makes a warehouse lead hunt for problems that should jump out; a decision page that refreshes hourly invites someone to re-decide every morning.

From purpose to design

For Nicole’s coupon question, the purpose sets the rest:

• KPIs: the ones that could change the decision. How much first-order sales the coupon brings, what the discount costs, and whether coupon customers come back as often as the others.
• Comparison: like for like. Coupon customers against non-coupon customers who signed up in the same months.
• Title: a sentence with the finding, written once the numbers are in. If the data showed it, that might be “Coupon customers come back less often: the discount only pays for the first order”.
• Detail: enough to answer the obvious follow-up (“by channel?”), not every column.

Change the request to “the warehouse wants to see pending orders every morning” and everything flips: no comparison of strategies, but today’s count, the oldest pending order, and a list sorted by age.

A complete dashboard

Whatever the purpose, a page people trust has the same qualities:

• it is built for a named audience,
• it uses the same definitions and periods everywhere (Sales means completed orders on every visual),
• it says where the data comes from and when it was refreshed,
• it shows the KPIs that matter, not everything in the database,
• it lets the reader act: drill into a segment, filter to their region.

Common mistakes

• “Can you build me a dashboard?” taken literally. Ask what decision or routine it supports.
• One page for every purpose. Split it: an executive summary, an operations page, an analysis page.
• No date on a decision page. A decision has a deadline; the page should show data as of it.