The three numbers first, and everything else lower

The order a page is read in

Top-left, then across, then down. That is not a preference, it is what a reader does before deciding whether to keep reading — so the page’s argument has to be in that order.

Position	Carries
Title and one line	What this is and what it decides
The tiles	The three or four numbers the decision turns on
The table	The disaggregation the decision needs
The figure	A shape a table cannot show
The context	Who it is for and what they are deciding
The method and the limits	What it does not show

Every dashboard on this platform is in that order, and the order is the same in both languages because it is about reading rather than about wording.

The two things that usually occupy the top and should not: a logo, and a filter control. A logo tells a reader nothing they did not know, and a filter asks them to do work before the page has told them why.

The tile

   56.3%
   Basic service
   improved and within 30 minutes

Three parts, and each is doing a job.

The value, large. One number, at the precision the interval supports. 56.3%, never 56.26%.

The label, plain. What it is, in the words the audience uses. “Basic service”, not basic_water_pct.

The note, small. The definition compressed to a clause — “improved and within 30 minutes” — because the tile is where the misunderstanding starts and one clause prevents most of it.

Colour only where it is a state. The dashboards here use the signal band on a tile only when the number is a severity or a data-quality flag, for the reason the visualisation course gave: spending green, amber and red on ordinary categories teaches the reader to stop reading them as measurements.

What goes behind a link

The phrase in the spine is “the detail behind a click”, and on a static page the click is a link to another artefact rather than an interaction.

On the page	Behind a link
Three headline numbers	Every indicator in the logframe
One disaggregation	Every disaggregation
The current round	The historic series, as a CSV
The finding	The notebook that produced it
What it does not show	The technical documentation that says why

A static page can do all of this with an anchor tag, and it survives being printed, emailed and opened offline — which an interactive filter does not.

This is a real trade and it is worth naming. An interactive dashboard lets a reader ask their own question; a static one answers the question it was built for and points at the artefact for everything else. For an audience on a metered connection, the second is usually the better bargain, and it is the one this platform took.

The five-second test, applied to a page

Show it to somebody who was not in the analysis and ask what it says.

If they read the tiles and state the finding, it works.

If they ask “what am I looking at”, the title is a file name. “WASH coverage and water quality by district” tells a reader what it is. “Dashboard” does not.

If they start scrolling immediately, the tiles are not the numbers they need.

If they ask what the number means, the tile has no note.

Print, and the phone

The two displays a programme dashboard is actually read on.

@media print {
  body { background: #fff; padding: 0; font-size: 11pt; }
}

# A dashboard that cannot be printed is one that cannot go in a meeting pack.

Somebody will print it. It goes into a meeting pack, it gets photocopied, and the version everyone in the room holds is monochrome. The tiles have to survive that, which is the greyscale rule from the visualisation course arriving as a layout constraint.

And somebody will open it on a phone. Tiles in a grid that reflows to one column, a table that scrolls horizontally inside its own container rather than pushing the page sideways, and no fixed width anywhere.

What the layout cannot fix

A page whose question is wrong. Ordering the wrong three numbers well produces a well-ordered wrong page, and the last lesson is the one that catches that.

A number nobody trusts. Layout does not create confidence; provenance does, and that is the next lesson.

A finding nobody wants. A dashboard cannot make an unwelcome result welcome, and the attempt — burying it below the fold, choosing a flattering disaggregation — is the failure this course ends on.

Report it whole

Dashboard layout

  Reading order: title and purpose, four tiles, district table, figure,
  commissioning context, method and limits.

  Tiles carry a value at the precision the interval supports, a plain label,
  and a one-clause definition. Signal colours appear only where the value is
  a severity or a quality flag.

  The historic series, the full indicator set and the analysis notebook are
  linked rather than embedded. The page is 8 kB, prints to one side of A4 in
  greyscale, and reflows to a single column below 640 px.

The size is worth stating. Eight kilobytes is a number a reader on a metered connection can weigh, and it is a claim the file itself either supports or does not.

What comes next

A well-laid-out number that nobody can source is a number that gets challenged every month. The next lesson attaches the as-of date, the source file and the refresh cadence to every figure on the page.