Learning analytics dashboards (LAD) deserve increasing attention, yet their adoption remains limited. Designing effective LAD is a difficult process, and LADs often fail in turning insights into action. We argue that providing explicit decision-making features in a participatory design process may help to develop LADs supporting action. We first examine how the decision-making process is reflected on LADs. Second, we review the literature to identify major design space dimensions and examine how to include decision-making features. Third, we propose the DEFLAD design framework to synthesise this review which provides explicit decision-making features in three dimensions: "goal" expression as a situation awareness level, "visualisation" and related "interactions," as support of decision-making process. Fourth, we consider how this framework is involved through every stage of a human-centred design (HCD) process to express and manage such features. The main contribution of this paper is to provide a framework integrating the decision-making features in a participatory design process of LADs. Furthermore, we demonstrate the implementation of our proposals through the development of a card-based toolkit to assist in the ideation phase of participatory design, and present feedback from participants of a workshop utilising this tool as a proof of concept.