ICA Commission on Use and User Issues workshop – April 2010 – Call for papers

This is call for papers for a workshop on methods and research techniques that are suitable for geospatial technologies. The workshop is planned for the day before GISRUK 2010, and we are aware of the clashes with the AAG 2010 annual meeting, CHI 2010 and the Ergonomics Society Annual Conference. However, if you would like to contribute to the book that the commission is developing but can’t attend the workshop, please send an abstract and inform us that you can’t attend.

In the near future I’ll publish information about another workshop in March 2010 about the usability and Human-Computer Interaction aspects of geographical information itself – see the report from the Ordnance Survey workshop earlier in 2009.

So here is the full call:

Workshop on Methods and Techniques of Use, User and Usability Research in Geo-information Processing and Dissemination

Tuesday 13 April 2010 at University College London

The Commission on Use and User Issues of the International Cartographic Association (ICA) is currently working on a new handbook specifically addressing the application of user research methods and techniques in the geodomain.

In order to share experiences and interesting case studies a workshop is organized by the Commission, in collaboration with UCL, on the day preceding GISRUK 2010.

CALL FOR PAPERS

While there is growing awareness within the research community on the need to develop usability engineering and use and user research methods that are suitable for geographical and spatial information and systems, to date there is a lack of organized and documented experience in this area.

We therefore invite researchers with recent experience with use, user and usability research in the broad geodomain (cartography, GIS, geovisualization, Location Based Services, geographical information, GeoWeb etc.) to present a paper specifically focusing on the research methods and techniques applied, with an aim to develop the body of knowledge for the domain.

To participate, please send an abstract of 1 page A4 at maximum containing:

• A description of the research method(s) and technique(s) applied
• A short description of the case in which they have been applied
• The overall research framework
• Contact details and affiliation of the author(s)

We are also encouraging PhD researchers to submit paper proposals and share experiences from their research. At the workshop there will be ample time for discussing the application of user research methods and techniques. Good papers may be the basis for contributions to the handbook that is planned for publication in 2011.

Abstracts should be submitted on or before 1 December 2009 to the Chairman of the Commission Corné van Elzakker ( elzakker@itc.nl )

Also see:
the website of the ICA Commission on Use and User Issues and  the GISRUK2010 website

Google Geo applications – deteriorating interfaces?

While Google wasn’t the first website to implement slippy maps – maps that are based on tiles, download progressively and allow fairly smooth user interaction – it does deserve the credit for popularising them. The first version of Google Maps was a giant leap in terms of public web mapping applications, as described in our paper about Web Mapping 2.0.

In terms of usability, the slippy map increased the affordability of the map with direct manipulation functionality for panning, clear zoom operating through predefined scales, the use of as much screen assets for the map as possible, and the iconic and simple search box at the top. Though the search wasn’t perfect (see the post about the British Museum test), overall it offered a huge improvement in usability. It is not surprising that it became the most popular web mapping site and the principles of the slippy map are the de facto standard for web mapping interaction.

However, in recent months I couldn’t avoid noticing that the quality of the interface has deteriorated. In an effort to cram more and more functionality (such as the visualisation of the terrain, pictures, or StreetView), ease of use has been scarificed. For example, StreetView uses the icon of a person on top of the zoom scale, which the user is supposed to drag and drop on the map. It is the only such object on the interface, and appears on the zoom scale regardless of whether it is relevant or available. When you see the whole of the UK for example, you are surely not interested in StreetView, and if you are zooming to a place that wasn’t surveyed, the icon greys out after a while. There is some blue tinge to indicate where there is some coverage, but the whole interaction with it is very confusing. It’s not difficult to learn, though.

Even more annoying is that when you zoom to street level on the map, it switches automatically to StreetView, which I found distracting and disorientating.

There are similar issues with Google Earth – compare versions 4 and 5 in terms of ease of use for novice users, and my guess is that most of them will find 4 easier to use. The navigation both above the surface and at surface level is anything but intuitive in version 5. While in version 4 it was clear how to tilt the map, this is not the case in 5.

So maybe I should qualify what I wrote previously. There seems to be a range here, so it is not universally correct to say that the new generation of geographical applications are very usable just because they belong to the class of ‘neogeography’. Maybe, as ‘neogeography’ providers are getting more experienced, they are falling into the trap of adding functionality for the sake of it, and are slowly, but surely, destroying the advantages of their easy-to-use interfaces… I hope not!

Interacting with Geospatial Technologies

At the end of September, the manuscript of ‘Interacting with Geospatial Technologies’ was submitted to John Wiley & Sons. This is the reason for the silence on this blog since July while the final chapters were written.

The book, which is an introduction to usability and Human-Computer Interaction aspects of GIS and other geospatial technologies, was written because there is no other recent book that covers these aspects while taking into account the special characteristics of geographical information and the extensive use of maps.

There were several books in the early 1990s dedicated to human factors of GIS or to cognitive aspects of these systems. Since then, there have been many published articles, but no easy-to-access summary of the outcomes in a way that is useful for developers or people who want to understand how to design more usable systems. So, while working on a paper that called for developing ‘usability engineering for GIS’ in 2005, I figured out that, actually, it was time to write an introductory text in this area. In the end, this is an edited textbook written by me together with a group of excellent collaborators: Jochen Albrecht, Clare Davies, Catherine Emma Jones, Robert Laurini, Chao Li, Aaron M. Marcus, Stephanie L. Marsh, Annu-Maaria Nivala, Artemis Skarlatidou, Carolina Tobón, Jessica Wardlaw and Antigoni Zafiri.

So the book provides an introduction to user-centred design and usability engineering from a geospatial technologies perspective, theoretical aspects of human understanding of space and collaborative systems, practical aspects of cartography and map design that are useful for developers and application designers, guidance for evaluating geospatial systems and some tips for designing desktop, Web and mobile based systems. Each chapter includes case studies and examples that make the material more concrete.

The book is scheduled to be out by March 2010. A lot of work went into writing the various chapters and ensuring that the content is covering all the needed elements to create a usable GIS – I hope that it will be useful!

Neo and Paleo GIS – is the difference in the usability culture?

At several recent GIS industry and academic conferences, I was not very surprised to see GIS presentations in which the presenter started by talking about ‘usability enhancements’ and ‘we took usability very seriously in this application’ but failed to deliver. In contrast to such statements, the application itself was breaking basic usability guidelines such as not giving any feedback to the user about some activity of the system, or grouping related elements together in the interface, among other problems.

Then I came across a report from 1991, which talks about User-Centred Graphical User Interface for GIS and notes that ‘It is not unusual for more than 60% of the code in a complex software system to be dedicated purely to the user interface. This stands in sharp contrast to the 35% dedicated to the user interface in early GISs’. This is still true in spirit, if not in percentage. GIS applications require sophisticated data manipulation, and most of the development effort of GIS vendors or Open Source GIS projects is focused on the information itself and its manipulation. The interface is probably seen as an add-on – the ‘fun’ bit of the development that you leave to the end after cracking all the engineering challenges that make the application work.

What I would argue is that, as a result, GIS as an industry doesn’t have a ‘usability culture’. Compare that to Apple, where usability and interaction with users has been at the centre of what they are doing since they started. Or with e-commerce which also shows a ‘usability culture’ because, if you fail on usability, there is a direct link to loss of sales. These are examples of organisations and sectors who know that usability is important and commit resources to ensuring that their products are usable.

In contrast, in the GIS industry there is a feeling that usability is a ‘nice to have’ element of the development process, so there is no practice of involving usability experts in software development projects. There are relatively few examples of user-centred design in GIS, and they are mostly in research papers, very rarely in practice.

Neogeography is changing it somewhat, since parts of it are coming from companies and developers who see the value in understanding the users. Maybe the competition between the existing developers of GIS and neogeography companies will cause the former to change and they will become more serious about usability.

The implications of the ten-year lag of geotechnologies

If we take the lag of geotechnologies behind mainstream computing as a common feature of this type of technology, there are quite interesting conclusions that can be drawn in terms of developing new applications and products. For example, it can help in predicting when certain technology will be ready for wide application in the geographical field.

Here is an example: very recently, Jakob Nielsen reported that he was positively surprised with the quality of reading from the Amazon Kindle 2, and that this is leading him to withdraw his conclusion that the efficiency of reading from a computer screen is low.

I’ve written about the problem of computer monitor resolution and the use of small screens for urban navigation – such as the use of maps for tourism where you would like to have a map that gives you a wider context of your area than the ‘tunnel vision’ that is provided on today’s mobile phones.

So here is my guess: in about 10 years, Kindle 10, or whatever its equivalent at that point, will be a suitable platform for delivering clever maps that can be as effective as paper maps. That means that if you are in the business of creating maps that will be used on these devices, you should start exploring how best to deliver them in about 5 years.

I can also guess that it will be more energy hungry, wasteful and way too expensive when compared to the paper tourist maps of today, but the prediction is about technology – not about what I think about its use…

The first ever Human-Computer Interaction and GIS research

Trying to track down the source of a term is one of the more interesting academic tasks. For example, finding out when people started researching Human-Computer Interaction and GIS is a bit like following the thread. First of all, the term Human-Computer Interaction is sometimes presented as Computer-Human Interaction, especially in the early 1980s, when it emerged – the ACM Special Interest Group still uses CHI and not HCI. Before that, the common term used was Man-Machine Interaction which was actually a term that came out of studies in the 1940s. The way to uncover this terminology chain is to find papers that mention both terms and follow it through. Quite quickly you develop an understanding of the chain…

Then there is the issue of GIS – after all, the term was invented only around the mid 1960s: surely many people outside the small circle of researchers that became familiar with the term used other terminology. So you need to look for other terms, such as geographic information (as well as geographical information), maps, etc.

Following this approach, I have found a paper from 1963 by Malcolm Pivar, Ed Fredkin and Henry Stommel about ‘Computer-Compiled Oceanographic Atlas: an Experiment in Man-Machine Interaction’. The paper is as interesting as its writers – with Pivar and Fredkin among the Artificial Intelligence group at MIT, and Stommel a leading oceanographer. The data came from surveys that were part of the International Geophysical Year (1957/8 ) – and the paper shows that information overload is nothing new.

For me, the most interesting passage in the paper is:

‘[I]n preparing a printed atlas certain irrevocable choices of scale, of map projections, of contour interval, and of type of map (shall we plot temperature at standard depths, or on density surfaces, etc.?) must be made from the vast infinitude of all possible mappings. An atlas-like representation, generated by digital computer and displayed upon a cathode-ray screen, enables the oceanographer to modify these choices at will. Only a high-speed computer has the capacity and speed to follow the quickly shifting demands and questions of a human mind exploring a large field of numbers. The ideal computer-compiled oceanographic atlas will be immediately responsive to any demand of the user, and will provide the precise detailed information requested without any extraneous information. The user will be able to interrogate the display to evoke further information; it will help him track down errors and will offer alternative forms of presentation. Thus, the display on the screen is not a static one; instead, it embodies animation as varying presentations are scanned. In a very real sense, the user “converses” with the machine about the stored data.’ (Pivar et al., 1963, p. 396)

What an amazing vision in 1963 – it would take another 30 years and even more before what they are describing became a reality!

Manifold GIS installation and different aspects of usability

As part of the work on community mapping in Hackney Wick, we used the area for a project with the Development Planning Unit MSc students. As part of this work, and since we’re using Manifold GIS in this project, we offered the students the use of Manifold GIS for this exercise.

From an experienced system administrator perspective, installing the package and linking it to the licence server is a very quick and easy task. However, for the students it proved to be a difficult task – especially with Windows Vista where special procedures must be followed to enable the administrator account and install Manifold GIS. The process is rather scary for the average user, and the information architecture and links on the Manifold website are not clear enough to guide a novice, non-technical user through the installation process. As a result, many didn’t manage to make the package work. After a brief explanation and being pointed in the right direction, the installation issue was resolved.

This is a very interesting aspect of usability which, many times, is overlooked. When looking at a GIS or a component of geotechnology, it is worth evaluating its usability for different audiences. With software, I would differentiate between ‘end-user’, ‘programmer’ and ‘system manager’ usability. For each of these archetypes it is possible to evaluate whether the package is easy to use for this role. For example, programmer usability can be evaluated by examining how long it takes for a programmer to learn how to manipulate the system and perform a task with it. The new generation of APIs such as those that are used by OpenStreetMap or Google Maps are very programmer usable – it takes very little time to learn them and achieve something useful with the system.

The installation of Manifold GIS, therefore, scores high on system manager usability, but low on end-user usability – and, importantly, there are far more of the latter than the former. Some small changes to the website with a clear installation guide can improve the situation significantly, but a real change to the installation process that removes the need to switch to the administrator account is the real solution…

Web Mapping 2.0 – an introduction to Neogeography in Geography Compass

In October 2007, Francis Harvey commissioned me to write a review article for Geography Compass on Neogeography. The paper was written in collaboration with Alex Singleton at UCL and Chris Parker from the Ordnance Survey.
The paper covers several issues. Firstly, it provides an overview of the developments in Web mapping from the early 1990s to today. Secondly, in a similar way to my Nestoria interview, it explains the reasons for the changes that enabled the explosion of geography on the Web in 2005: GPS availability, Web standards, increased spread of broadband, and a new paradigm in programming APIs. These changes affected the usability of geographic technologies and started a new era in Web mapping. Thirdly, we describe several applications that demonstrate the new wave – the London Profiler, OS OpenSpace and OpenStreetMap. The description of OSM is somewhat truncated, so my IEEE Pervasive Computing paper provides a better discussion.
The abstract of the paper is:

‘The landscape of Internet mapping technologies has changed dramatically since 2005. New techniques are being used and new terms have been invented and entered the lexicon such as: mash-ups, crowdsourcing, neogeography and geostack. A whole range of websites and communities from the commercial Google Maps to the grassroots OpenStreetMap, and applications such as Platial, also have emerged. In their totality, these new applications represent a step change in the evolution of the area of Internet geographic applications (which some have termed the GeoWeb). The nature of this change warrants an explanation and an overview, as it has implications both for geographers and the public notion of Geography. This article provides a critical review of this newly emerging landscape, starting with an introduction to the concepts, technologies and structures that have emerged over the short period of intense innovation. It introduces the non-technical reader to them, suggests reasons for the neologism, explains the terminology, and provides a perspective on the current trends. Case studies are used to demonstrate this Web Mapping 2.0 era, and differentiate it from the previous generation of Internet mapping. Finally, the implications of these new techniques and the challenges they pose to geographic information science, geography and society at large are considered.’

The paper is accessible on the Geography Compass website, and if you don’t have access to the journal, but would like a copy, email me.

Why your boss should buy you a larger monitor

As I’ve noted, the AGI GeoCommunity ‘08 was a great conference, but it was especially pleasing to end up with the paper that I wrote with Kate Jones being selected as runner-up for the best paper competition by the conference team (and I kept myself at arms length from the judging!). Maybe it is a sign that the message about the importance of usability and interaction is starting to gain traction within the GIS community, though I should also note that Clare Davies from the OS raised the issue in the AGI conference in 2005 – so it’s still one usability paper every 3 years!

While you can download the full paper from here, or look at the presentation below, the short explanation of the argument behind the large monitor is actually raising a very significant and overlooked aspect of interaction with GIS.

Inherently, the issue is that interaction with maps is all about the context. You can’t design the position of a telephone pole if you can’t see the other poles, and you can’t understand where you are in relation to a local tube station without seeing it. This is where the abysmal resolution of current computer monitors causes a problem. Because the information density (the amount of information that you can cram into a specific area, say a square inch) of a monitor is low – it’s 10 times lower than a printed map – it’s actually very rare that you can put all the information that the user needs on one screen.

This is why all GIS developers are giving too much attention to zoom and pan operations, as they are perceived as the solution to this problem. However, and this is the most important point – zoom and pan are never part of the user’s task. The user is not interested in zooming and panning for their own sake, but in manipulating the map so they can see the area that they need to perform their task (adding a pole to the map, analysing neighbourhood, etc.). In an ideal world, the GIS will ‘know’ what area the user is looking for and will show it so there is no need to manipulate the map. However, we don’t have this so we must use zoom and pan…

Here is where the productivity issue kicks in. An average zoom or pan operation in a GIS application can take up to 30 seconds. Over a working month, this can accumulate into many hours for a heavy user of a GIS. A larger monitor (24 inch or even 32 inch) will reduce the number of zoom and pan operations, and thus increase the productivity of the user. Considering that a GIS analyst’s minute is costing about £0.30 (a conservative estimation), the large monitor will return the investment within 2 months.

But even more important is the issue of GIS interface design – this analysis emphasises why the decision on how much screen assets are dedicated to the map should take into account the user’s task, and not assume that they’ll zoom and pan!

The new London crime mapping website

The Metropolitan Police Authority has released a beta version of their new Crime Mapping application, showing the generalised level of crime (burglary, robbery and vehicle) for Lower-level Super Output Areas (LSOAs). The application uses generalised boundaries of LSOAs , and use a clear classification of the level of crime. Interestingly, the Show Us a Better Way website includes several suggestions for crime mapping – so there is an ongoing public interest.

This is not surprising, based on my own experience with CamStats, which was developed in collaboration between me, Kate Jones and Dave Ashby for Camden Police in late 2003, with the website operating from early 2004 until late 2007.

As you can see from the slideshow above, the information that CamStats provided is richer than what is available today. CamStats was based on static maps, and was very easy to produce – we designed it so a team administrator (with no GIS skills) could compile monthly and annual statistics simply by copying a data file to a processing machine, and then clicking one button in Mapinfo Professional which called Mapbasic, Perl scripts and other utilities to create, process and map the data and compile the HTML pages for the website into one zip file. All the user had to do was transfer the zip file to the Met web team who easily updated the webserver by unzipping the files. The fact that it was running for three years without any request for support is something that Kate and I are justifiably proud of.

Notice that CamStats provided options to see different geographical units, different forms of visualisation and to view the information in tabular and chart forms. Users could even download the aggregate counts for each area to compile there own reports. This was particularly useful for a number of community groups in Camden.

There is no question that the use of Google Maps, which provide context for the statistics is a huge usability improvement over our implementation. However, it will be interesting to see how long it will take the Met team to reach the functionality and ease of use CamStats provided …