Lecture 3: Focus and Audience

Who is it For?

• It’s impossible to do good communication without thinking about who you’re communicating to
• Something you make for a highly technical audience should be different from something you make for a non-technical boss, or an outsider, or the general population
• And, crucially, all of it should be different from what you’d make for yourself
• Communication is not about what you say, it’s about what people hear. Different people hear differently.

Who is it For?

Always ask:

• Who is going to see this?
• What do they know?
• What don’t they know?
• What do they need to know?

What do they Know?

• Keep in mind the technical skill of your audience - have they seen this graph type before? Do they know what a median is? Can my boss read a graph (yes really)?
• Keep in mind the contextual knowledge of your audience - are you using lingo they don’t know? Abbreviations?
• Keep in mind where their head is at - you’ve been staring at the data for hours so you know “AR” means “annual revenue.” Is that what they’ll think if they see “AR”? You’ve done a million projects before so you know that $1 million is way above-average for March. Will they recognize that?

Presentation

• Your audience does not know what you know
• In many cases they may not care as much as you care
• And even if they know and care, they may not understand the way you think about it
• Don’t be afraid to hold their hand
• Even if they are very familiar with what you’re doing, they’ll appreciate clarity. It will let them know that you know what you’re doing
• Don’t assume people will read your work super super closely. Make your work such that the right conclusion to draw is also the most obvious one

Tips

• Have someone else look at your work and tell you what they think it means (maybe trade with them in this class?)
• After finishing something, give yourself a little break from it and come back. Ask: “if I had no idea about what this was, would I figure it out? What conclusion would I draw? Would it be the right one?”
• And “What could I change to make the proper conclusion even more obvious?” How can you focus attention?
• It can rarely be too obvious! Rarely are there points for subtlety here.
• As with anything (not just thinking about audience) always look at your work and ask if it looks right

Example

• What are some communication errors here?

Mistakes

• What are “visits”? (Logged mobile-phone visits to locations in these industries, but how would you know?)
• Top five industries… at what? Where? (Seattle in June 2020, but how would you know?)
• Scientific notation (Not everyone can read this!)
• What are those industries? Nature parks we can guess, maybe the restaurant types. But what are Lessors of Nonresidential Buildings (except Miniwarehouses) and Snack and Nonalcoholic Beverage Bars? (Malls and Cafes)
• Why are restaurants two industries?

The Three Rules of Presentation

A good way to focus attention on the story you want them to understand is to prepare them to receive information

• Tell them what you’re going to tell them
• Tell them
• Tell them what you told them

Presentation

• When transmitting information, always let the reader know where to go. Give them a bucket to put the information in before you give them the information.
• Really well-done research or argumentative writing makes the reader think of the next point you’re going to make before you even make it
• Similarly, well done data communication doesn’t assume knowledge of the reader and is willing to direct their attention.

A Demonstration

• Watch for how this neuroscientist explains something to different audiences
• How does he adjust both content and delivery style to who he’s talking to?
• How does he give them a bucket for the information he’s about to provide?
• How does he get them engaged with what he’s talking about?

Guiding Our Audience

Beyond considering our audience’s capabilities, we also want to think about how to guide their attention

• How can we nudge them as to where to look, what to compare, what continuities to see?
• How can we prepare them to receive the story we want them to understand?

Focusing Attention

• We want to tell a story with our data
• Some stories are simple
• Others are complex
• They all need to be clear
• And we may need to walk the reader along

Foreground and Background

• We are already trying to focus our reader by making the viz in the first place
• After all, we could avoid focusing them entirely by just showing the full data set, but we don’t do that
• Can we focus them further to make the story even clearer?

Foreground and Background

• Think about what you want to highlight - these are the parts that will draw the eye and get the most attention
• You don’t have to limit yourself to only including the information that drives the story home (although do get rid of as much clutter as possible)
• But the important parts, the ones that produce the right conclusion, should be as visible as possible
• In writing, you may have learned about inverted-pyramid structure
• In visualization there are other tricks we can use

My Mom’s Car

• What does the driver want to know? And what is highlighted?

My Mom’s Car

• The driver probably wants to know how fast they are going
• And how full their tank is
• Instead the focus is heavily on the RPM of the engine, and the other things are tucked back, faded out by glare, and not where you immediately look
• (more confusing is that the RPM is a dial that looks like a typical speedometer, but isn’t)

Preattentive Attributes

• How can we direct the eye where we need it to go?
• Thankfully, (most of) you have been looking with your eyes your whole life!
• So this should be pretty intuitive

Preattentive Attributes in Images

• Our brain knows what to look out for
• This should be pretty intuitive
• The purpose here is to emphasize one important thing!
• Let’s go through some commonly usable ones:

Color

Intensity

Size

Width

Enclosure

Keep in Mind

• With all of these attributes, some are more important than others!
• And more intensity generally means more attention
• Rather than providing a direct order, remember that it’s subjective - try things out, see what is intuitive

An Example

Use Color Sparingly

Choose Colors for Focus

Also Make Them Look Good

Choose Intensity for Focus

Proximity for Focus and Comparison

Declutter

• Labels might not even be necessary!

Could we Go Further?

• Declutter with days-of-week \(\rightarrow\) just one point for weekday, one for weekend
• Do we need the other ticket types?
• Slope graph?
• Move the title in closer?

Designing for Focus

• Highlight what’s important
• Remove distractions
• Unimportant stuff CAN be backgrounded

Annotation

• Annotation can be a great way of pointing out features of the data
• If you can tell the reader what you mean rather than making them infer it, that’s probably good
• (although if they’d always infer it without you having to tell it, that’s even better)
• Remember - walk your audience through the data, and don’t be afraid to interpret for them!

Annotation

• Tell them what you’re going to tell them: Title the graph with the story or insight
• Tell them: Have a graph that demonstrates that story or insight
• Tell them what you told them: put a label or arrow or other attention-drawing element that makes clear how the graph supports that title

Explanation with Audience and Focus

• Pick something that you know a lot about, and pick something interesting about that thing.
• Prepare a ~1 minute explanation of that interesting thing
• Take turns giving that explanation to your partner
• Then, after both explanations have been given, have them explain back to you the thing you explained to them. How accurate is it?