State of the Map EU - Presentation

Just a quick pointer to the recording of my presentation here at SOTMEU. So, far a great and vibrant conference, and our research into usability issues in OpenStreetMap was well received. I was particularly pleased by the positive reaction from a lot of conference attendants to our work, it seems that most core community members are well aware of the issues we raised, and recognise the need for improvement.

This small research project from us then represents the first of an ongoing effort to better embed and implement a usability engineering culture in this great project!

GIS are still hard to use! The interface design of a desktop GIS ensures they are NOT easy to learn....

Desktop Geographical Information Systems (GIS) are not user friendly they require time and effort to learn and remember. They are not intuitive and for new learners the first time they are faced with a GIS can be overwhelming experience, where do you start? These difficulties are nicely summarised in the user interviews I have been conducting.

One of our specialist users described their first and so far only encounter with a GIS. They were looking to just explore what the software could do – without being able to dedicate any real time to learning it. They successfully downloaded some geographically referenced data from Digimap (it was actually MasterMap). They then started the GIS programme and spent 5 to 10 minutes trying to open the data that had just obtained, in that time they did not succeed to open the data so they gave up and made their map in Photoshop. They found GIS too difficult to use. From a usability perspective this represents an issue in learnability. The design of the desktop GIS meant that the new learner failed in the first hurdle- adding existing geographical data to a map.

The notion that desktop GIS are hard to use is not new. More than 15 years ago in 1995 Traynor and Williams discussed the issues of usability in GIS presenting a paper with the title, "Why Are Geographical Information Systems hard to use?" at the annual ACM conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems.

Today, desktop GIS are still just as difficult to use!! The interface design really does not make them easy to learn. Will this change as the development of VGI web-mapping interfaces progresses since they rely on contributions by the general public?

Open Street Map: Moving the Search

Last week Patrick blogged about usability experiments we were conducting with online editing tools for volunteered Geographic Information (VGI) - Open Street Map was the subject of the experiments.

His post : Usability and the GeoWeb - Don't make me think!

The post discussed is how usability of web GIS acts as a barrier to adoption. Eye tracking experiments we conducted showed how even the location of common functionality, such as "Search" impacts the user interaction and user experience.

Three days after the Patrick's original blog post, we have noticed that the search function for the OSM website (the object of our experiments) has moved location....this is an impact for our project.

We are really pleased that OSM were able to respond so quickly and we are delighted that our work is already having an impact for users of OSM.

The new location of Open Street Map search function is located at the top of the page were the users expect the search to be located. This is more in line with the F-pattern in which we view web pages. Whilst this is not the perfect location, it is much improved.


(watch this space there is more to follow.....)

Usability and the GeoWeb - Don't make me think!

Hi, this is Patrick, the technical lead developer on the project, and I have put off blogging here for far too long. I hope that I can catch up with my other team members and write about some of the interesting issues I have encountered through this project.

One of the primary concerns in this project for me are barriers to adoption, ie. how we can make an easy to use, fun online environment for users to learn spatial concepts. This concern also motivated me to develop another research project looking at usability in OpenStreetMap, that I am currently working on, which has profound implications for the design of this project.

Altough OSM is thriving, 70% of visitors who open an account do not go on to make a single edit to OpenStreetMap. To investigate why this is the case, we analysed through eye tracking and screen capture ten OSM novices through their first experience registering, adding and editing information to OSM. You can catch a brief peak into the first results in another blog post I did on my personal research blog, at spatialknowledge.eu.

OSM is an interesting case study of geo web usability because of the fact that users do not simply consume geo data, but are actively engaged in creating and editing new geographic data, resulting in much more advanced spatial learning challenges, including different spatial data types (point, line, polygons), how to define attributes and ontologies, dealing with different data layers and even advanced GI concepts such as topology.

A basic example you can see in this video below, which highlights the importance of putting common web interaction elements where users expect them. In this case, the Search functionality's position is the last place the user is looking, when it is one of the most common used functions.

The finished research will highlight not only specific usability problems that the OSM project currently has in engaging and supporting their user community, but also give a fresh view of the way non expert GIS users approach and interact with spatial data consumption and creation. This research then should give this project a profound insight into how non-experts approach and understand geo data and concepts, and how this can be translated into usable and engaging interactions and interfaces.