As a data visualization expert, my job is to listen to clients and give them what they need, which is not always what they think they want.  

I sometimes work with clients who want a dashboard because they have seen dashboards online and think it is the only way to present their data. Or they want a map because “our data includes city and state.” But when I start asking them questions about their audience, their platform, what they want people to do with the information, and how they will access it, it often turns out that, while they may want a dashboard, what they need is an infographic, or a visual brief, or a simple interactive. And even if it turns out they do need a dashboard, it’s still worth validating and fully understanding that need. 

So here are my standard questions. My experience doing cognitive interviews helps me with this listening process because I must often probe for more details. (Surprise! People don’t always know what they need.) I begin with big picture goals and then dig deeper into the nuts and bolts. 

I like to start with these questions because it gets everyone on the same page right out the gate.

What is the big story?

This is the overall picture, bottom line, or big takeaway. I often challenge clients to give me their answer in five words or less; if they were to write a newspaper headline, what would it be? For example, instead of “We want to show that measures of health vary by socioeconomic factors and that poverty increases the risks of disease,” the headline is “Poor people die younger.”

It does not mean we will use the headline; the exercise serves to help everyone focus on the crux of the story and not get sidetracked by the garden path. It also helps clients get on the same page because they often come in with different expectations from the same task.

What is the goal of the visualization?

This one is tricky to get out of clients. Do they want to change public opinion or influence policy? Do they want to prove the value of their data to secure future funding? Or is it simply a deliverable?

This may require some probing because some people do not want to be transparent. But it is important to understand their (true) goal so that the deliverable is shaped accordingly.

These questions are vital to the success of the project. I ask these questions second because they are often shaped by the big story and goal. And there’s no point in asking the questions below if they cannot answer the questions above or disagree about the goal.

Tell me about your audience…and tell me about your audience.

I am not trying to be obtuse; these are really two different questions. 

First, tell me about your audience. Who is reading this visual report or playing with the dashboard? Picture them in your head—what do they look like? What do they need? Give them a name. How do they think? What is their favorite color? How much do they know about the topic? Do they care about uncertainty? And if they don’t, for the sake of all that is good in the world, please don’t include uncertainty.

Second, tell me about your true audience. This ties back to the goal. While the audience may be the general public, the true audience could be the media because your client wants the story to be picked up by news outlets and spread across the world. Perhaps the audience is policymakers, but the true audience is the funding organization because you have another proposal due. This may sound cynical, but we all have a job to do and bills to pay, so understanding your client’s true intentions is vital.

Most likely the client has given some thought to the “big” questions, but this is where we hit them with the details, and the details often break the budget, so ask about them soon.

In what format is the data?

Do I need to scrape the internet, code PDFs, or is everything coming to me in a nice clean CSV (please, please)? This is super important for process planning, cost, and time. Also, is the data final, or will the client be updating it over the course of the project (please note that will be a time and money suck)?

Where will the visualization live, and…where will it live?

Let me break this down into two parts.

• Part 1: “Where will it live” as in “where will the audience see it?”
  
  Is the visualization going to be online or printed and stored in a drawer? Is it going into a journal? These questions get to how users will access the visualization and its format. Will the dashboard be online, public-facing, or private? Will users need a password to access the dashboard? If the client wants an interactive, then we should probably not create a PDF. If it is going to live in a journal, does the journal have image requirements?
• Part 2: “Where will it live” as in “where will it be hosted?”
  
  This is tied to hosting. Will the dashboard live on the client’s servers or mine? What are the IT requirements or limitations to their systems? Do we need to involve the client’s IT in addition to ours? Are there clouds, portals, and techy stuff involved? IT has strict regulations, and knowing these ahead of time reduces last-minute headaches. This is super important because all this costs money.

Also, think long-term: who is going to maintain it over time or fix it if it breaks? That has contract implications.

How will the client promote the visualization?

This is tied to dissemination. Do they need a press release? Does the client need an image and blurb for their LinkedIn post? 

This is necessary because it affects your team. If the client is going to need a press release, then the team needs to include communications experts—either yours or the client's, or both. It is not a good idea to wait until the end of a project to start thinking about dissemination.

Why should the audience care?

If we ask the audience to spend five seconds reading an infographic, or five minutes playing on a dashboard, or $5 million to pay for more work, what do they get out of it? Why is this topic important…to them?

This can be a challenge. Push the client to make the visualization personal to the audience (or the audience’s bank account).

If you invest the time into making these questions part of our data visualization development process, you’ll be more likely to produce something your client actually needs and that their audience will actually care about. You’ll also likely save time and money in the long run because you’ll have worked out the details in advance rather than figuring them out (and then doing things) as you go.