We are excited to share that our paper, “Practitioners’ Perspectives on Designing Data Visualizations for the General Public,” has been accepted at CHI '26 (ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems)! Regina Schuster presented the paper at CHI ’26 in Barcelona on 15 April 2026.

Data visualizations are everywhere in public communication, from news websites and print articles to Instagram posts and short-form videos. But designing visualizations for a broad general audience is not straightforward. Practitioners are often told to “know their audience,” yet in real-world journalistic work, that audience is frequently broad, diverse, and only vaguely defined. To better understand how creators address this challenge, we conducted semi-structured interviews with 21 professionals who regularly design public-facing data visualizations across news organizations, graphics organizations, freelance work, social media, and science communication.

Our findings show that practitioners commonly design with four main aims in mind:

• Attention: Visualizations first need to make people stop and look. Practitioners described aesthetics, novelty, and engaging formats as important ways to catch attention, especially in fast-paced social media environments.
• Comprehension: Supporting understanding was a central priority. Interviewees emphasized clear labels and annotations, familiar chart types, step-by-step guidance, and textual explanations for abstract concepts such as percentages, uncertainty, or logarithmic scales.
• Trust: Credibility was closely tied to accuracy, transparency, and careful sourcing. Practitioners highlighted the importance of fact-checking, showing data sources directly on the visualization, and being open about limitations or uncertainty.
• Connection: Beyond clarity and trust, practitioners also wanted visualizations to feel relevant and relatable. They described deliberately using color, treating sensitive topics carefully, and connecting data to people’s lived experiences through stories, locations, or human examples.

Across these aims, several broader strategies stood out repeatedly: conveying one clear message, telling a relatable story, simplifying without losing too much accuracy, and adapting the design to the platform. In particular, practitioners often treated the platform itself as a proxy for audience needs, meaning that design choices were shaped less by detailed user profiles and more by whether the visualization was intended for print, a website, Instagram, TikTok, or another channel.

At the same time, our interviews revealed a gap between the value practitioners place on feedback and the reality of evaluation in everyday work. Formal user testing was rare. Instead, practitioners typically relied on peer feedback, editors, their own experience, and reactions after publication, such as comments, shares, and social media responses. This reflects the practical constraints of public-facing visualization work, where tight deadlines and limited resources often leave little room for systematic audience testing.

In the paper, we discuss what these findings mean for future visualization tools and workflows. We argue for better support for audience-centered design in practice, including tools that help creators think through different audience needs, adapt visualizations across platforms, develop message-first workflows, and integrate lightweight evaluation into fast-paced production contexts.

Citation to paper: Regina Schuster, Kathleen Gregory, Torsten Möller, and Laura Koesten. 2026. Practitioners’ Perspectives on Designing Data Visualizations for the General Public. In Proceedings of the 2026 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '26), April 13-17, 2026, Barcelona, Spain. Association for Computing Machinery. DOI: 10.1145/3772318.3790627

Keywords: Data visualization, practitioners, journalism, general public, social media, design strategies, evaluation, user testing, media channels.