There are numerous possible approaches to building dashboards based on your objectives. The following is by no means a comprehensive list:

• Guided analysis: You've done the analysis, made the discoveries, and thus have a deep understanding of the implications of the data story. Often, it can be helpful to design a dashboard that guides your audience through a similar process of making the discoveries for themselves, so the need to act is clear. For example, you may have discovered wasteful spending in the marketing department, but the finance team may not be ready to accept your results unless they can see how the data led you to that conclusion.
• Exploratory: Many times, you do not know what story the data will tell when the data is refreshed in the next hour, next week, or next year. What may not be a significant aspect of the story today might be a major decision point in the future. In these cases, your goal is to provide your audience with an analytical tool that gives them the ability to explore and interact with various aspects of the data on their own. For example, today, customer satisfaction is high across all regions. However, your dashboard needs to give the marketing team the ability to continually track satisfaction over time, dynamically filter by product and price, and observe any correlations with factors such as quality and delivery time.
• Scorecard/Status snapshot: There may be a wide agreement on Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) or metrics that indicate good versus poor performance. You don't need to guide the audience through discovery or force them to explore. They just need a top-level summary and sufficient detail and drill down to quickly find and fix problems and reward success. For example, you may have a dashboard that simply shows how many support tickets are still unresolved. The manager can pull up the dashboard on a mobile device and immediately take action if necessary.
• Narrative: This type of dashboard emphasizes a story. There may be aspects of exploration, guided analysis, or performance indication, but primarily you are telling a single story from the data. For example, you may desire to tell the story of the outbreak of a disease, including where, when, and how it spread. Your dashboard tells the story, using the data in a visual way.

We'll take a look at several in-depth examples to better understand a few of these different approaches. Along the way, we'll incorporate many of the skills we've covered in previous chapters and we'll introduce key aspects of designing dashboards in Tableau.