What is the context of a data visualization? What this refers to is the audience of the visualization and the purpose of it. Are you designing a data visualization and are you wondering if it’s ready for sharing? Several questions could be asked, such as who is your audience? What is the purpose of your data visualization?
What are the needs, purposes, objectives, knowledge, skills and biases of your target audience? How familiar with the subject matter is your audience? Would your user be a novice, user or expert? Should you develop different types of visualizations for each of them? Would a table of data be appropriate for the experts so that they can read the exact values? Perhaps. In other words, how much or how little detail should we include? Do the users need to “drill down” into the data to explore it on their own?
People’s biases can influence their interpretation of a visual without them even knowing it. Do not introduce distrotions in your design. For example, zero-base the axes and do not use 3D pie charts.
One common technique for keeping different kinds of audiences clearly in mind is by using personas. These are descriptions of user types that capture characteristics, goals, and needs of different types of users.
Pay attention to the words you use. The same word can have different meanings in different industries. Think about “risk” in the bank loan sector and “risk” in the cybersecurity or insurance industry. Across cultural boundaries words can have different meanings. We need to know our audience.
Where does your data visualization fall in the spectrum between exploration and explanation? Are you presenting something that the users already know? If so, it’s explanation. If the visualization is more exploratory, can you include some interactivity in you visualizations? For example, in Tableau could you have a user-facing parameter in your visualization?
Purpose drives design.
Ultimately, your visualizations’ purpose is two-fold.
- Solve Problems or Challenges
- Generate Further Questions and inspire investigation