Tableau Software : How to build a trust infrastructure between your data team and your audiences

In order to collaborate, you need to know enough about what your audience needs so that you can tailor your approach. It all starts with empathy, meaning, do you actually care about what they want and why they need it? Empathy is universal, it's non-hierarchical, it's free-and best of all-empathy creates more empathy.

One of the best ways to breed empathy is simply by talking to people. Be curious about what your audience is doing and why they need data to do it. You'll be surprised at how infrequently people ask basic questions about what others do on a daily basis and how data influences that work. Everyone likes to talk about themselves, so when you ask a question it signals their importance in your relationship. Just by showing curiosity, your audience will start to wonder why you care so much, and this usually forms the basis for more conversations. Before you know it, empathy creates more empathy.

A case study from Elijah Meeks, Senior Data Visualization Engineer at Netflix:

'From a practical perspective, empathy needs to be demonstrated in your work as well as your meetings. In most cases, when I'm asked to create an analytical product at Netflix, it already exists in some other form (a Tableau dashboard, an rShiny app or a data science notebook). The first thing I do is recreate the data visualization in the form they expect (a bar chart, a cumulative density function, or a table), and only then do I introduce other visual forms as context or prototypes for new approaches.

With data visualization, audiences have strong associations with certain data taking certain forms-not just the charts but often the whole dashboard. Demonstrating empathy in these situations is accomplished by rendering the form they expect and then gently transitioning that form into something more effective. Hence the emphasis on semantic similarity in exploratory design.'