Database Reference
In-Depth Information
airplane to walk them through the data may be a good investment. On the other hand, if
you'd like as many people as possible in the general public to receive a data message, you'll
have to find an effective way to broadcast the message. Knowing your goal, and knowing
who makes up your target audience, informs these decisions.
Principle #6: Check the Results
It is a good habit in general to incorporate into your efforts feedback loops and checkpoints
that help you gauge whether you've achieved your intended results or not. This allows for
course correction in the case of woefully unmet goals, or fine-tuning in the case of slight
miscues.
There are a few questions to ask when you check the results. We'll call this the “RUI”:
Reach
Did the audience even receive your message at all? Who did and who didn't?
Understanding
Did the audience interpret the data message in the way you intended?
Impact
Did the audience react in the way you wanted them to react?
Asking these questions will help you hone your message and communicate data better, and it
also will show an appropriate degree of respect to your audience.
Summary
In this chapter, we considered the act of communicating data as an integral step in a larger
data discovery process, and an important type of communication in general. We also con-
sidered three problems that can get in the way of communicating data well—the technical
problem, the semantic problem, and the effectiveness problem. Lastly, we considered six
principles to overcome these problems and achieve our goals. These six principles can be ap-
plied regardless of the tool or software used.
In the next chapter, we'll provide a general overview of one particular software tool for com-
municating data: Tableau.
