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?

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.....)

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.

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.