It's no surprise that we have to know our audience in order to communicate effectively with our data. Unless we consider who they are, what they care about, and how they prefer to consume information, we'll be unable to tailor our messaging so that it connects and resonates as best as is possible.

Sometimes we think about basing our messaging around whether our audience is “knowledgeable” or not. After all, the audience’s familiarity and expertise levels would drive, for instance, how much background information we would feel compelled to provide, or how technical we would get with the detail we include in our charts. We might worry that we're wasting people's time if they already know the basics of the topic under discussion. By the same token, we wouldn’t want to barge forward with technical details and dense jargon in a presentation to an audience that could use a refresher or a broader overview.

We don’t always think to consider whether our audience is "knowledgeable" in a data literacy sense. We are all multifaceted humans, and we are all familiar with different things. And if we are considering the knowledgeability of our audience, we need to include more than just “familiarity with the data” or “works in the subject area” as our criteria for assessing knowledgeability. We should consider whether a chart type might be seen as brand new or old hat.

Sometimes you will have an audience that isn’t familiar with the subject, but is very comfortable with data and complex visualizations. Sometimes you’ll have audiences that are industry leaders in their particular fields, but are unfamiliar with charts beyond the most basic forms.

I’ve struggled with this distinction in my own work. I've spent a lot of time collaborating with people in the data visualization space, so my idea of “what chart is easy to understand?” can be skewed compared to the broader business world. So at times, even when I correctly assessed and tailored my work to the specific subject matter expertise of my audience, the graphs I delivered didn't resonate, because they were too unfamiliar.

For this challenge, consider two different extremes of “knowledgeable.” Using any data set you like, find a message that you’d use a data visualization to convey. (For example, if you wanted to build a visualization about, say, Sanrio characters or Minecraft, kids may be subject matter experts but would be unfamiliar with a lot of graph types, whereas adults might know very little about the topic area but could be educated via more complex visuals.)

Create two visualizations that get that message across, one for each of two different audiences:

For version 1, imagine that your audience really knows the subject matter, but is used to seeing data in tables and is not particularly familiar with data visualization.
For version 2, imagine that your audience knows next to nothing about the subject you’re visualizing, but would be comfortable with whatever esoteric chart you could throw at them.

Share your creations in the SWD Community by August 31, 2023 at 5PM PT. If there is any specific feedback or input that you would find helpful, include that detail in your commentary. Take some time to browse others’ submissions, too, and share your input via comments and datapoints over the course of the month.