As I am in the process of writing my book I find certain challenges in the use of language crop up time and time again. The main one I have difficulty with is maintaining consistency in how I term the person who reads, uses or consumes a visualisation or infographic work. It is particularly problematic when I am constructing a sentence that really needs a singular catch-all label and not a multi-comma-separated list attempting to cover all nuances. That makes it both clumsy to write and to read.
Yesterday, I asked my esteemed twitterati to suggest the language terms they use or feel most comfortable with in order to arrive at a consensus viewpoint or at least accept there are too many variations to be able to settle on one single term.
Rather than leave it buried on Twitter, I have storified a collection of the contributions people made (thank you to all again) so that others can join the debate.
However, in summary and unless I am presenting with an alternative compelling argument, my decision is to go with VIEWER. Regardless of the type and format of visualisation we are working with, we are always ‘viewing’ a visual portrayal of the subject’s data.
USER is an appropriately active term for describing those who engage with an interactive project – but even when we have the ability to interact we are not doing so constantly, we do stop to look.
READER feels more associated (in my definition) with specific acts of reading text, values and point-reading from a chart. It is clearly a key component of engaging with a visualisation but not a universal act – when we’re taking an initial ‘at a glance’ perspective, that’s not in my view a specific act of reading.
AUDIENCE would be something I would maybe use in a different written context but is problematic when referring to an individual.
CONSUMER, CUSTOMER, RECIPIENT, RECEIVER and (even) VICTIM are either too passive, too context specific or feel too harrowing.