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Practitioners' Perspectives on Designing Data Visualizations for the General Public
Schuster, Regina Gregory, Kathleen Möller, Torsten Koesten, Laura
Schuster, Regina
Gregory, Kathleen
Möller, Torsten
Koesten, Laura
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3772318.3790627.pdf
Adobe PDF, 1.09 MB
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Human Computer Interaction
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Conference proceeding
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http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
Language
English
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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.
Citation
R. Schuster, K. Gregory, T. Möller, L. Koesten, "Practitioners' Perspectives on Designing Data Visualizations for the General Public," 2026, pp. 1-19.
Source
Proceedings of the 2026 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
Conference
CHI 2026: CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
Keywords
46 Information and Computing Sciences, 4608 Human-Centred Computing, 47 Language, Communication and Culture
Subjects
Source
CHI 2026: CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
Publisher
Association for Computing Machinery