Agi 2008: Usability And Gis

Slideshow Transcript

1. Slide 1: Usability and GIS – why your boss should buy you a larger monitor Muki Haklay Department of Civil, Environmental and Geomatic Engineering, UCL
2. Slide 2: Content • What is the problem? • Why are GIS hard to use? • What is usability? • Usability engineering for GIS • The impact of screen size on productivity
3. Slide 3: The problem with GIS • Vendors’ press releases state ‘usability improvements’ and ‘ease of use’ but actually push functionality over interface • GIS users find it difficult to switch between products - and can’t perform basic operations on a GIS • Many GIS experts are employed to produce basic maps
4. Slide 4: Why do we end up with this?
5. Slide 5: Why are GIS hard to use?
6. Slide 6: Why are GIS hard to use?
7. Slide 7: Why are GIS hard to use?
8. Slide 8: Why are GIS hard to use?
9. Slide 9: Why are GIS hard to use? • As Identified by Traynor and Williams (1995): – GIS is complex: it is based on knowledge from Geography, Cartography, Databases, Statistics, Computer algorithms and data structures… – Requires users to have or acquire considerable technical knowledge in order to operate the system Traynor and Williams (1995) ‘Why are Geographic Information Systems hard to use?’
10. Slide 10: GIS – organisations and people • Nancy Obermeyer (2000) suggested that: ‘ … an organization implementing its first GIS is less likely to have great familiarity with the technology, a clear idea of the qualifications that will best meet its needs, or the expertise and experience to evaluate the candidates who apply’ • This later type of organisation is rapidly becoming the norm Source: Unwin (2005) ‘Masters of what? Educating the GI labour force’
11. Slide 11: Many ‘accidental geographers’ • Around 4m GIS users, spread over around 2m sites (Longley et al., 2005, Ch.17) • ESRI (2000) estimated about 500,000 users of its products world-wide and around 50,000 full time GI professionals • Most with little or no training in GIS, Geography, Cartography or Geomatics Source: Unwin (2005) ‘Masters of what? Educating the GI labour force’
12. Slide 12: The challenges of usable GIS • Complex technology, bringing in concepts from many areas • Not all users and developers can be expected to take degree programmes in GIScience • Over 40 years of development, leading to a rich set of functions and applications. Many of them complex and sophisticated
13. Slide 13: Making GIS Usable: Usability Engineering Usability engineering is the output of Human-Computer Interaction research. It attempts to measure a system’s usability in terms of its: – Learnability – Efficiency – Memorability – Error rate – User satisfaction
14. Slide 14: Memorability?
15. Slide 15: Learnability ? Source: Coddinghorror
16. Slide 16: Error rate/user satisfaction Anita Adendorff (South Africa) wrote at 8:07pm on August 29th, 2007: “At least yours still has the decency to apologize! Mine crashes without any indication leaving me wondering for 5-10 minutes whether it's just taking ages to open the doc or if it has called it a day. I have become VERY familiar with consulting the task list. Ag man, dis als so boring!” Source: Facebook, F*ck you, ArcMap!
17. Slide 17: Efficiency/error rate/learnability
18. Slide 18: Usability engineering for GIS • Dealing with the fundamental problems of HCI and GIS • Accepting that the user community as it is – do not assume a ‘GIS driving licence’ • Methods should be easy to implement, cheap and relevant for the developers and users • An example: some basic aspects of computer maps that we seem to ignore
19. Slide 20: Paper maps vs. computer maps
20. Slide 22: Map are about context, not about locations • Maps are different sort of information from a list of search results or URLs • Maps are about context: Showing the information over background map Providing the reader enough area to see the context
21. Slide 23: Computer maps • Zooming in, out and panning are not part of what the user want to do (task), they are ways to overcome the abysmal resolution of computer monitors!
22. Slide 24: Source: Skarlatidou, 2005
23. Slide 25: The size of the map matters
24. Slide 26: Comparing productivity • Use exactly the same task (find files, create a map) • Run on a small monitor (1024x768) and on a large monitor (1920x1200) • All actions were video recorded and analysed to measure pan and zoom operations
25. Slide 27: Results Large monitor Small monitor Differences: 69% more operations on a small screen and additional 2 minutes...
26. Slide 28: Map size and productivity • Requesting users to send a snapshot of their screen in the middle of their working day • Examine what they are using and how their screens look like • Analysing how many applications are running, size of task bars etc. Source: Zafiri, 2005
27. Slide 39: Findings • GIS users tend to use higher resolutions. • More experienced users are using bigger maps • In GIS, the map area ranges from 70% to 25% • ESRI users: smaller map area (average 56%) more inactive toolbars.
28. Slide 40: Summary • GIS is difficult to use for good reason, but made harder by lack of ‘usability culture’ of vendors • GIS Usability knowledge exists within the research community, and differs from the knowledge of general usability consultants
29. Slide 41: Summary • When designing GIS interfaces, pay more attention to the map, give it all the area of the screen that you can • Finally, your boss should buy you a larger monitor – it will pay back in productivity