IIGLU - how usable will it be?

By now if you have been following the blog you will know that the team are interested in the usability of geospatial technology and that we are developing an e-learning environment for teaching and supporting the learning of geospatial concepts. Hence, the blog post an IIGLU is born. IIGLU is the name of our tool and stands for Interactive, Integrated, Geospatial, Learning and Understanding. We like the name IIGLU because in its other sense an igloo is a construction that uses building blocks to slowly build up and develop - rather like the teaching geospatial concepts where complex ideas are broken down into smaller parts. IIGLU has two components one where teachers can record their tutorials and one where the students access the tutorials and play them back.

In a previous blog post I discussed the Child of 10 usability standard. The idea behind which is that a child of 10 can do something in 10 minutes. We have considered this standard throughout the development of the IIGLU application. What you see in the sneeky preview is prior to the CSS and the interface design scripting. Patrick, our developer is working on this as we speak.

For students using IIGLU it will be straightforward and intuitive to use without requiring any help documentation or instructions. Students should be able to log in, select a scenario or geographic concept and then work their way through the tutorial steps using a simple next or back button. Simplicity is the underlying premise. We have placed priority on the user friendly development of this component.

We have also given priority to the geospatial concepts and knowledge building process and not to the complex interactions with the map. Therefore, 3 types of multimedia are currently supported: HTML, Map, and You Tube Video. So there is this great video from the TV series West Wing all about the distortions that result from map projections: it is the perfect way to introduce new learners to map projections (see previous post on reflections of teaching map projections). The e-learning environment will enable complex geospatial concepts to be presented without the frustrating interactions required with learning with a desktop GIS.

An IIGLU is born, or a project development and brand update

This is the first one of the overdue development activity updates from the JISCG3 project. I have been busy over this summer with the development of the web interface, which we now christened IIGLU. The idea of IIGLU comes from “Interactive Integrated Geospatial Learning and Understanding” (to be honest, the second I only comes so we could grab the most popular domains!). This name is a take on the word Igloo, which is made of large building blocks representing the different steps of geographical understanding in our tutorial. Conveniently, an igloo is also sort of shaped like a globe/earth, returning the focus to gegography!

With the name set then, we are now ready to release a first demo of the tool, which I quickly put together this afternoon and recorded in this screencast:

As you can see from the video, we now have a functionally complete web-environment, where registered users can create new interactive tutorials, and classify them in different overarching scenarios. Each tutorial consists of a series of 'states', using different mediums such as rich text, videos, and most importantly an interactive web-mapping environment. The idea with the states is that we can provide in each tutorial a set of anchor points to which a learner can return if they get lost, all the while preserving a rich interactive user experience, especially when it comes to the web-mapping. Further development of functionality will focus on the inclusion of more spatial functionalities, as well as thematic formatting, to make this a much more rich environment encompassing a wide range of geographic concepts.

There are still plenty of rough edges to trim, and we need to put a nice face on the functional interface. We have just completed the design of a website logo, and will attack the styling of the User Interface this week. So hopefully, in a couple weeks time, I will be able to give a much more polished presentation of the system!

Technical Development details (warning, geoweb-geekiness ahead!!):

The technical design of the tool consists of two major components:

• Server-side framework (we used GeoDjango, a spatially aware web development framework as the basis). The server manages the user and tutorial creation, editing and management, and serves all the tutorial data and connected spatial datasets for use by the client in a standards compliant manner (GeoJSON), with all the data residing on a PostgreSQL + PostGIS database.
• Client framework (developed in JavaScript/JQuery) enables a rich user interaction experience, with a dynamic and fast guidance of the user through the tutorials, and efficient tracking of the user state and progress through the tutorial.

You might notice that we use OpenLayers as our mapping library, which slightly contravenes the previous conclusions we arrived at in this project regarding appropriate web-map API's. These conclusions reached previously about ease of development and deduplication of effort, achieved by reusing legacy codebase from different projects, were rendered irrelevant after switching to a structured web development framework, ie (Geo)-Django, and enabled us to use OpenLayers instead to take advantage of greater capabilities and openess of this library.

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: State of the Map presentation

Just a quick note from the JISCG3 team, Kate and Myself we will be presenting our usability research on VGI editors at the the 1st European State of the Map Conference of the OpenStreetMap project held 15th-17th July 2011 in Vienna, Austria.

The talk will draw upon our previous work in evaluating the usability of the Potlatch editing environment, an online data editing interface for OpenStreetMap.

This presentation presents one of the first systematic investigations into the usability of Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI) editor front-ends, using established best practice in Human Computer Interaction (HCI) research. The two front-ends evaluated are Potlatch 2 and Google Map Maker, to present contrasting views of the user experience of two major VGI projects. Two user groups with no prior experience of VGI contribution were instructed to enrol and contribute data to both VGI projects, and their interaction with the two services were monitored using a mobile eye tracker and video screen capture software in a computer lab environment. The resulting data was analysed to reveal how users interact and experience VGI editors, as well as highlight deficiencies and differences between Potlatch 2 and Google Map Maker. The results from this research project are a set of recommendations for the future development of these editors, specifically relating to improving the user experience and ease of use of VGI editors.

The talk will be recorded and hopefully put online after, I will link on this blog to it as soon as possible afterwards.

Hope to see you there, and looking forward to the discussions!

Reflective Teaching Practice: Do I need to know there is such a thing as a map projection?

Myself and Claire have just arrived back from the Island of Malta, where we both participate in the International Summer School in GIS held at the University of Malta. We both design and deliver lecture material targeted at professionals who are discovering how GIS maybe useful.

We were discussing our observations of the students and how they learn and interact with the GIS software and its theoretical principles.

One subject up for debate was, "do new learners of GIS and its concepts need to know immediately about projections?" There is a tendency to be puritanical about what concepts new learners of GIS need to understand putting aside this tendency, our conclusion was: “Not necessarily”.

Let me explain. Most everyday users of Bing Maps, Google Maps etc interact with the map quite happily without needing to know that a projection system makes it possible to create the digital representations of the world. The same can be said for users of navigation systems in cars or on phones.

Therefore, it is only natural that a new user of GIS, creating their first map using off the shelf Shape files or MapInfo Tabs (for example taken from Edina’s Digimap service), does not need their first interaction to introduce the complexities of coordinate systems that enable real world to be projected in 2 dimensions. It is only when their data they want to map is not GIS ready that they need to be introduced to a projection system.

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.....)

Child of Ten Standard of User Interface Design

A useful benchmark in user interface design is the Child of Ten standard. This means that a child of ten should be able to learn to do something useful with the system within 10 minutes. This indicates that a system is “easy to use”. In 1998 Al Gore discussed this in the context of GIS and digital globes as cited by Goodchild his paper “the Use Case of Digital Earth” in 2008.

I do not know if this has actually been validated for digital globes such as NASA World Wind or GoogleEarth but from personal experience I am absolutely certain they are easier to use, easier to learn and easier to remember the functionality than proprietary desktop GIS.

In this project we aim to develop a useful and usable GeoWeb application for non experts and so this benchmark could be incorporated into the testing and development phase – can non-experts learn to do something in our application within 10 minutes? Something to consider.....

Urban Design User Expert Interview Summary

This word cloud summarises one of the interviews I conducted with user experts as part of the JISCG3 project. It highlights words repeatedly spoken during the interview and is a useful way of indicating several themes we discussed:

· The scale used in urban design projects from context to site to building

· The importance of software such as AutoCad and Photoshop

· The use of maps

· The use of GIS

The word cloud provides a recap of the interview prior to moving on to more conventional qualitative analysis, which begins with the identification of themes used to encode all the interviews transcripts. I particularly like the placement of the 3 words GIS, think and maps!

As part of the project we are interviewing experts from urban design, environmental management and anthropology in order to develop useful use case scenarios particular to new GIS learners from different disciplines.