The twenty-tile request is a symptom

The request as it arrives

“Can you build us a dashboard? We want coverage, admissions, defaulting, stock-outs, staffing, funding burn, beneficiary numbers by district and by month, and the indicators from the logframe.”

That is twenty tiles and it is a real request. Somebody wants to stop asking for numbers by email, and the dashboard is what they have a word for.

It is also a specification that guarantees a page nobody opens twice. Twenty numbers with no ordering is a table with more colours, and the reader has to supply the question the page should have answered.

The question to ask instead

“What decision are you about to make, and what would change it?”

Ask it once and one of three things happens, and all three are useful.

They name a decision. “Which six communities get rehabilitation.” Now you know the page has one job, the ordering is by that job, and most of the twenty tiles are not on it.

They name a recurring meeting. “The monthly cluster call.” Then the dashboard’s job is to make that call shorter, and the design question is what gets argued about every month — which is usually a definition, not a number.

They cannot answer. That is the most common outcome and it is a finding rather than a failure. It usually means the numbers are wanted for assurance rather than for a decision, and the honest response is a monthly one-page summary, not a dashboard.

Write the answer down at the top of the page, in the words they used. Every later argument about what to include is settled by reading it.

What each of the seven dashboards here is for

Every project on this platform states its decision in the entry, and the dashboard is built against it.

Project	The decision it informs
WASH coverage	Which six of eighteen communities get water point rehabilitation
Nutrition screening	Where the next screening round and CMAM capacity go
Protection pathway	Which gate in the referral pathway to fix first
Food security	Which instrument the caseload figure is based on
School attendance	Which schools need an attendance response, and which look bad for a reporting reason
SMART survey	Whether the survey’s quality permits publishing a prevalence at all
Vaccination coverage	Whether a coverage figure reflects service or a denominator

None of them is “monitor the programme”. Each is a sentence with a verb in it, and the tiles are chosen by whether they move that verb.

Three tiles, not twenty

The rule that survives contact with a real request.

Three headline numbers, at the top, in the size of a headline. They are the ones the decision turns on.

One table underneath, which is the disaggregation the decision needs — by district, by commune, by stage.

One figure, if a shape matters. Most pages need none; a pathway or a trend needs one.

Everything else goes behind a link, or into the report, or nowhere.

TILES = ["households surveyed", "improved source", "basic service", "no E. coli"]
assert len(TILES) <= 4, "if this fails, something has to leave the page"

# An assertion in the build is a more durable specification than an agreement.

Four is the practical ceiling and three is better. A row of tiles is read left to right and then abandoned.

What to do with the other seventeen

They are not worthless — they are the wrong artefact.

The ask	Where it belongs
Every logframe indicator	The quarterly report’s annex table
Historic monthly series	A downloadable CSV, linked from the page
Beneficiary counts by everything	A pivotable export, not a page
Anything updated yearly	The report, not the dashboard
Anything nobody could name a use for	Nowhere, and say so

Offer the alternative in the same sentence as the refusal. “Not on the dashboard, but I will put every logframe indicator in the quarterly annex and send you the CSV” is a different conversation from “no”.

The tile that should not be there

A tile earns its place only if a plausible value would change what somebody does.

def earns_its_place(tile) -> bool:
    """Would any value of this number change a decision this quarter?"""
    return tile.decision is not None and tile.threshold is not None

# If you cannot state the threshold, the tile is decoration.

Ask for the threshold. “At what value of this would you do something different?” A tile whose owner cannot answer is a tile that is being watched rather than used, and watching is what a monthly report does more cheaply.

Total beneficiaries is the usual example. It goes up, everybody likes it, and no value of it changes anything. It belongs in the report.

Report it whole

Dashboard scope, WASH coverage project

  Question the page answers: which six of eighteen communities receive water
  point rehabilitation in the next funding cycle.

  On the page: households surveyed, improved source, basic service, share
  with no detectable E. coli; the district table; the source-against-service
  figure.

  Requested and not included: monthly trend (the survey is a single round),
  every logframe indicator (quarterly annex), beneficiary totals (no
  threshold could be stated), staffing and funding burn (a different
  audience and a different page).

  Agreed with the WASH coordinator on 2025-02-11. Revisit when the second
  survey round exists, which makes a trend meaningful for the first time.

The “requested and not included” paragraph is the deliverable of this conversation, and writing it down is what stops the same twenty tiles being requested again in June by someone who was not in the room.

What comes next

A page with three numbers on it can still bury the one that matters. The next lesson is about the order they are read in, and about what belongs behind a link rather than on the page.