Know your Audience

Over the years, dashboards have evolved as a powerful tool that enables business users to make better and faster decisions backed by data. It serves as an important communication tool to transmit complex information about your business performance. When creating a dashboard, the first and foremost question to keep in mind is: Who is the intended audience? If the audience is not defined clearly, the message that is communicated may not be effective.

Imagine a spectrum of audience for a dashboard. On the left side, we have data-hungry analysts and scientists who want as much information as possible. To cater to this audience, several dimensions in the data need to be squeezed into a tiny amount of space in the dashboard – so it’s vital to keep the graphic as clean and compact as possible. Rather than portraying a specific story and guiding the audience, we simply present the information in an easily consumable fashion giving the user full control in navigating the information.

On the other end of the spectrum, we have an audience that’s not as data savvy and would like the storyline presented with highlights and conclusions. The audience here is not familiar with the information and neither do they have a lot of patience to pore through it. One needs to advertise the data and explain it as efficiently and as quickly as possible with a primary focus on the conclusions.

These are the two extremes of the audience spectrum and there are varying degrees in between. It’s important to understand where your audience stands on this spectrum, and how much data do they need to see. Follwing is a link to one of the visualizations that I think might be appealing to an audience
across the entire spectrum:

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/projects/vancouver2010/medals/map.html

References:

www.klipfolio.com/blog/first-rule-dashboard-design-audience
blogs.forrester.com/ryan_morrill/13-11-11-data_visualization_catering_to_your_audience