"Being Simple on Complex Issues" -- Accounts on Visual Data Communication about Climate Change

Data visualizations play a critical role in both communicating scientificevidence about climate change and in stimulating engagement and action. Toinvestigate how visualizations can be better utilized to communicate thecomplexities of climate change to different audiences, we conducted interviewswith 17 experts in the fields of climate change, data visualization, andscience communication, as well as with 12 laypersons. Besides questions aboutclimate change communication and various aspects of data visualizations, wealso asked participants to share what they think is the main takeaway messagefor two exemplary climate change data visualizations. Through a thematicanalysis, we observe differences regarding the included contents, the lengthand abstraction of messages, and the sensemaking process between and among theparticipant groups. On average, experts formulated shorter and more abstractmessages, often referring to higher-level conclusions rather than specificdetails. We use our findings to reflect on design decisions for creating moreeffective visualizations, particularly in news media sources geared toward layaudiences. We hereby discuss the adaption of contents according to the needs ofthe audience, the trade-off between simplification and accuracy, as well astechniques to make a visualization attractive.