DAT 530 Audience-Specific Visualizations Guidelines and Rubric
Overview: Understanding your audience and considering them in your design is essential for building great visualizations. In this exercise, you will explore the critical steps for identifying and understanding your audience, while analyzing complex visualizations and its message. Module Four discusses the importance of developing a visualization for an intended audience and bringing the data together so that the audience can receive it with the desired impact and response.
There are many strategies for visualization, depending on the audience, which will inform the use of color, detail, creativity, humor, and more. In this assignment, you will access a reliable data set. Use that data set to create a different visualization for three different audience types, using some of the strategies presented in the module.
Prompt: Using Microsoft Power BI, choose a data set, define three different audiences to create visualizations for, and create a distinct visualization for each audience, submitting screenshots of your visualizations with written analyses of why you chose the data set, a description of each audience, and an explanation of why you chose the visualization style and elements that you chose for each audience. Microsoft Power BI has the capability to connect to a wide variety of datasets including many web pages, Excel files and CSV documents. You may choose to select your own dataset from any publicly available data source. If you do not wish to select a dataset for this exercise, a data file regarding automotive safety recalls is attached to the assignment link in Learning Modules->Module 4. Data provided courtesy of NHTSA. This activity should be submitted as a single document.
Your assignment submission should address the following critical elements:
• Visualizations
o Using the available data and tools, create the plots, graphs, and so forth for each audience that match the needs of the audiences.
• Audience Needs
o Contrast the needs and sophistication of the three target audiences.
▪ Will the overall message change for each audience?
▪ How familiar will each audience be with the issue at hand and with the terminology?
▪ How will things such as educational levels, age levels, primary language, cultural diversity, and so forth vary among your target audiences?
• Data Visualization Methods
o Provide an explanation of why each data visualization method you chose is appropriate for each audience.
o Explain the strengths and weaknesses of the data visualization methods used.
NOTE: Make sure to save your three visualizations and data selections for next module where additional steps will be taken to change these graphics.
