How can you make your visualizations inclusive for all audiences?

My data visualization approach is audience-driven, meticulously tailored to their insights. I engage directly, using methods like surveys to grasp their needs. The message's essence is tied to demanded metrics. Platform choice is strategic; for collaborative presentations in my organization, Power BI Server excels. However, with spreadsheet-based collaboration, caution is needed with Excel due to evolving SQL and cloud solutions. The audience's attributes dictate the platform, factoring in data familiarity, roles, and preferred devices. It's about crafting a resonating data narrative.

First and foremost, give your dashboard a proper name. Executive dashboard, Finance Qlik, Qlik app, Power BI app etc are very generic. Give a meaningful name to your dashboard. This would be useful especially for new users, they can see a name of a dashboard and know what it contains. Consistent data format, labelling, layout, colour usage across all applications is really necessary. Users should feel the familiarity in accessing the dashboard. One dashboard containing KPIs in landing page and another dashboard containing detailed report in landing page is going to confuse users, especially the ones who are accustomed to patterns. Use the colours correctly, for some metrics a negative number is good so colour it green not a standard red.

I've always believed that labels hold a pivotal role in effectively communicating with an audience. Ensuring labels are beginner-friendly and easily comprehensible by a layman is paramount to avoid any misinterpretations. Personally, I've found that opting for labels like "sum of clients" rather than "total clients" can make a substantial difference in clarity. It's about creating a seamless connection between data and understanding.

For Dashboard and Data models, my only advise is keep it as simple as possible. Adding complicated Visuals and charts always makes us feel great, and sometimes we go overboard to find and create a new KPIs which the business was not aware of, but most of the times these extra efforts are not only discarded, but also considered as irrelevant. So its always better to keep the rich Visuals and Data derived KPIs for insights to our POCs and provide the users exactly what they asked for. (sometimes we can provide them choices) in a Template followed by your organization. For most part Summarized KPIs on Top, Filters after KPIs and the Viz objects below and Tables/pivots in the bottom. Try using the Self Service Objects wherever necessary.