Practitioners' Perspectives on Designing Data Visualizations for the General Public

CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, pp. 1–19

Abstract

Public-facing data visualizations can play a vital role in making complex information clear and engaging, thereby encouraging informed public discourse and participation. However, existing work offers limited insight into how practitioners make design decisions based on their envisioned target audiences and across different media channels. To investigate this, we conducted semi-structured interviews with 21 professionals from journalistic settings, focusing on how they conceptualize their readers, translate these notions into design choices, and evaluate their work. We found that practitioners often rely on broad audience definitions, despite considering “knowing their readers” essential. Evaluation primarily relies on peer feedback or social metrics rather than user testing. From these accounts, we identify recurring strategies employed to reach general, often undefined publics. We discuss implications for audience-centered authoring tools, proposing features such as persona simulations and content-adaptive multi-format authoring, message-first rhetoric-aware workflows, and lightweight in-tool evaluation to better support the realities of public-facing design.

Authors 4

1. Regina Schuster

   University of Vienna

   Affiliation as printed

   Faculty of Computer Science, Doctoral School Computer Science, University of Vienna, Vienna, Austria

2. Kathleen Gregory Aachen Centre for Science and Technology Studies

   Leiden University

   Affiliation as printed

   Centre for Science and Technology Studies, Leiden University, Leiden, Netherlands

3. Torsten Bert Möller

   University of Vienna

   Affiliation as printed

   Faculty of Computer Science, Data Science @ Uni Vienna, University of Vienna, Vienna, Austria

4. Laura M. Koesten

   University of Vienna · AIT Austrian Institute of Technology GmbH · Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence

   Affiliation as printed

   Department of Human-Computer Interaction, Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence, Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates; AIT Austrian Institute of Technology, Vienna, Austria and Faculty of Computer Science, University of Vienna, Vienna, Austria