The article is published at Nightingale – the Journal of Data Visualization Society.
“Considering the audience” is one of the most important pieces of advice in storytelling and data visualization. It is generally suggested to think about their needs, goals, and ability to understand the items displayed in the visual.
This allows our message to reach them more easily and resonate with them better, but the idea of “considering the audience” itself is quite vague. Some of us have a natural sense of empathy and “get” the right approach quickly, while some of us don’t and need a more concrete checklist.
For example, we have guidelines on how to deal with colour blindness – which is a trait our audience might have, but examples like these are usually floating alone.
In this article, I will turn the vague suggestion “consider the audience” into something more checklist-like, which you could go through and consider the audience “considered”.