Know your audience and purpose

Before you start any type of visualization, ask the following: Why should it exist, and who does it help? If you do not know your audience, consider developing personas. If you do know your audience, use your personas to determine their objectives.

Note:

Personas are fictional, research-supported profiles that help design for real people. Personas should include demographic data, use cases, motivations, and behavioral patterns.

Persona and use case

Consider a persona. Think about the map or data visualization you want to create. What is the most important single action this person should be able to do after examining your map or visualization?

The five whys

With the five whys framework, ask "why" for every decision that goes into crafting your data visualization until you strip audience and purpose down to essential requirements.

• Why this target audience?

• Why is that their objective?

• Why does this data matter?

• Why will they understand it?

• Why do they already have that context?

Ask "why" until you run out of whys to consider. This will help identify the must-haves and eliminate the wants.