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!

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.

Public geographies and accidental geographers

In the post about the Engaging Geography seminar, I’ve discussed how different levels of engagement with geography can be used to define if a person using a system should be considered a ‘public geographer’ or just a consumer of geographical information in a passive and ephemeral way.

Thinking more broadly on geotechnologies, it is appropriate to include the people who are producing many of the everyday geographical representations. Frequently, the people who are producing these representations use GIS.

When thinking about the Web, it’s clear that the vast majority of the people involved in public geographies do not have any ‘formal’ geographical background. You might think that, in the case of GIS, because of the barriers to entry, the situation will be different.
This is not so. As Dave Unwin noted in his paper in 2005, many of the people operating GIS are actually ‘accidental geographers’. When you take the number of GIS users worldwide, it is clear that only a few have gone through formal geographical education beyond basic school geography. Unwin notes that ‘accidental geographers’ have naïve conceptualisations of geography (for example that it is all about the location of factual objects in space), lack of understanding of spatial analysis and sometimes have a dismissive attitude to the academic disciplines of geography or cartography.

Neogeography is putting these accidental geographers in a new light. Some users do indeed see geography as uncomplicated and GIS as the ‘something that produces maps’. However, as a person is exposed to systems that are dealing with geography for a sustained period she is more likely to start questioning the nature of this geography and the way that it is represented. After a while, these questions will lead to a process of learning about geographical concepts – and the fact that so much information is now available on the Web will certainly help. Sometimes, the commitment to geography might lead to joining organisations such as the AGI and maybe even becoming Chartered Geographers (GIS).

So, in summary, there is a whole range of commitments and interests in geography, and both accidental geographers and neogeographers can be positioned along a continuum from ignorance to expert knowledge. I think that most will move through this continuum and enjoy the process of developing geographic knowledge.

Public geography, public geographers and neogeography

Engaging Geography is an Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) funded seminar series, originally conceived by Duncan Fuller, who is sadly missed. The seminars are an appropriate tribute to his memory. The first seminar was held in Newcastle at the end of January and there will be 5 more over the next 2 years. So there plenty of opportunities to join!

The seminar gave special attention to public geographies – such as films that are an output of academic geographical research; photography and exhibitions by artists who deal with geographical issues in their work; and the wide range of examples that are coming out of the work of geography teachers and school geography.

The seminar was thought-provoking with lots of practical demonstrations and discussions about many issues – including how gender influences public geographies, the impact of communication, private geographies and many other issues that were packed into the two-day seminar.

During the discussions, Daniel Raven-Ellison, who runs Guerrilla Geography and Urban Earth, noted that the rapid increase in digital geography (neogeography) where geography is ‘used’ by many is one of the best examples of public geographies. This made me think more about the meaning of public geography and public geographers in the context of neogeography.

I would argue that we should differentiate between systems (websites) that are not based on user-generated content (mash-ups and public mapping sites) and those that require active geographic contribution from the user.

As Byron Antoniou (who is doing his PhD at UCL) noted, within the websites that are based on user-generated spatial content, we should differentiate between geographically explicit systems (OpenStreetMap, Geograph) and geographically implicit systems (Flickr, Wikipedia). The latter can hold geographic information, but that is not their main objective.

So, when users use a public mapping site passively, they don’t engage with the geography of the place fully. They consume a geographical image and, because of the nature of browsing, this image will disappear in the general haze of the many pages and images that they are exposed to. Considering that the average user might view up to 150 pages a day, this is no more ‘public geography’ than a map in a newspaper. Even the programmers that construct mash-ups are not ‘public geographers’ – they are concerned with the automation of the representation, and very rarely consider the visualisation carefully. Not surprisingly, the exceptions (such as London Profiler) have been created by people with a deeper understanding of geography.

In geographically implicit systems, there is some engagement with geography, but it is limited and might even be mechanical. For example, if GPS information is used to automatically geotag an image on Flickr or Picasa, the user is not actively engaged with the geography of their image. The engagement can be higher for example when a person creates a memory map, or manually locates the image position on the map, as it forces the person to recall the real world geography and match it with the map.

Finally, geographically explicit systems are, in my view, mostly public geographies. Because of the task that they were designed for, contributors are aware of the geography that they engage with both in the digital form and in the real world. For example, when a participant captures a road in OpenStreetMap, she is forced to consider the real world characteristics of the street as well as its digital representation. Thus, a meaningful engagement with space and place is an integral part of working with these systems.

Yet, because of participation inequality, even in geographically explicit systems only a small group of participants (about 10% or maybe less) are becoming deeply engaged with the process and working with the system for a period of time that allows them to develop a fuller geographical understanding of projections, scale, place, space and other ‘deep’ geographical concepts.

So while it might seem that there is an explosion of digital mapping information and applications, the number of public geographers – while growing – is quite small.

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.

Nestoria interview

Nestoria is a property search engine covering the European market, based on Web 2.0 technologies such as mashups; in this case, a Google Maps mashup to show the locations of the properties. The company blog run a monthly interview and I had the pleasure of being the Nestoria interviewee for this month.

The interview addresses several aspects of neogeography, including the reasons for its rise and the implications for professional GISers. I comment on results from my evaluation of OpenStreetMap data and the implications of crowdsourced geographic information on businesses such as Nestoria.

The interview can be accessed on the Nestoria blog.

WUN Global GIS Academy Seminar – What’s So New in Neogeography?

These are the slides from the Worldwide Universities Network Global GIS Academy Seminar from the 22nd October. The seminar’s title is ‘What’s So New in Neogeography?’ and it is aimed largely at an academic audience with background in GIScience.

The aim of the talk is to critically review Neogeography: explain its origins, discuss the positive lessons from it – mainly in improved usability of geographic technologies, as well as highlighting aspects that I see as problematic.

The presentation starts with some definitions and with the notice that mapping/location is central to Web 2.0, and  thus we shouldn’t be surprised that we’ve noticed a step change in the use of GI over the past 3 years.

By understanding what changed around 2005, it is possible to explain the development of Neogeography. These changes are not just technical but also societal.

The core of the discussion is on the new issues that are important to Neogeography’d success, but also raising some theoretical and practical aspects that must be included in a comprehensive analysis of the changes and what they mean to Geography and geographers.

The presentation is available below from slideshare, and the (very rough and without proofing) notes are available here.

How can we ensure that GI is a good career choice?

This entry is based on my article that was published in GIS Professional, December 2007 issue. Reproduced with permission from GIS Pro.

AGI’07 was the setting for a provocative debate on whether “GI is a bad career choice“. Speaking for the motion were GiSPro publisher Stephen Booth and AGI past chair Simon Doyle. Vigorously opposing were Gesche Schmid of Atkins and The Geoinformation Group’s Dr Seppe Casattari.

The debate, which worryingly for the AGI was only marginally lost, sparked lively interest from the audience. The text below argues that the more important question is “How can we ensure that GI is a good career choice?“

This article is mainly aimed at professional who are working in GIS at all levels.

It seems that there was never a better time than the present to be a GI professional – demand for skills is high, pay is good and prospects are rosy. It was a delight for many of us to read the famous article in Nature in 2004, announcing increased demands forpeople with knowledge and the ability to operate geospatial technologies. According to the US Department of Labor, GI is ‘one of the three most important emerging and evolving fields, along with nanotechnology and biotechnology. Job opportunities are growing and diversifying. . .’ What could be better?

Veterans of GIS can attest to the dramatic increase in awareness and knowledge of geospatial technologies. If you have been working in GIS for more than five years, then you belong to the generation which, when trying to explain what your job involved, would launch into a convoluted explanation, only to end with “oh, well, it’s complex”. The advance of satnav, geobrowsers such as Google Earth and the ubiquity of web mapping sites such as Multimap and Google Maps, together with those “mash ups” that bring new applications on top of them, are making it much easier to explain what we do and the importance of maps and how the use of geographical information can help in daily routines and in business. So, you conclude, GI is an excellent career choice with a fantastic future.

Is the picture quite so rosy? The rise of ‘neogeography’ is highlighting some risks, and there are certainly cautionary tales to be learned from our professional allies: land surveyors, photogrammetrists and cartographers. A significant reason for concern is that in the era of ‘neogeography’ many core geographical concepts are seen as unproblematic and not worth bothering about, as Dave Unwin noted in his 2006 AGI Educational Lecture (or a similar paper in Geoforum). There are some issues that matter greatly to GI professionals but which the vast majority of users don’t seem to care about. One example is the lack of metadata in applications like Google Earth, e.g. the ability to tell when the data was collected and the currency of each piece of information. Some users of these systems even think that they can log on and check if their car is still parked in front of their home!

Or consider the place of cartography. It seems that a large proportion of the new web mapping applications are ignoring many important cartographic principles – look at some of the current sites and you can spot the lack of legends, poor selection of colour for thematic mapping and other aspects of properly composed maps. Yet, for many users and for too many applications, this problematic world in which geography is useful, but cartographical and geographical information science principles do not matter, is a very satisfying world and many are happy to live and use geography in this way. In such a world, what will prevent your future employer from saying: why do I need a person that costs me so much, when we can hack something easily with a web mapping API (Application Programming Interface)?

Here is where we need to look at the lessons learnt by land surveyors, photogrammetrists and cartographers. Not so long ago, maybe 15 or 20 years ago – well within the span of a professional career – being a surveyor or a photogrammetrist seemed like an excellent career choice. For photogrammetrists, the increased use of digital aerial photography meant that there would be a need for their skills and for the surveyor the requirement of ever increasing complex civil engineering projects and the need to understand how to use GPS, meant that they, too, should have a secure future. But look at what has happened to those professions today. The entry salary for a photogrammetrist is very low (that is, if you manage to find a job) and the same is true for land surveyors. This is reflected in the demand for academic courses.

Importantly, it is not the case that automation has eaten away all these jobs, though to some extent it has. Nor can it all be blamed on outsourcing and off-shoring. What happened is that more and more employers think that because of automation, GPS, total stations and satellite imagery, they do not need the highly paid skills of the professional photogrammetrist or the surveyor – they can just hire a technician and the machine will do all the calculations. . . Of course, many practising surveyors can provide tales of companies that have discovered midway through a project that they actually need the skills – but now they don’t have them. This attitude has led to widespread errors – but the overall trend doesn’t change.

Arguably, what happened with these professions is that they failed to convey the importance of the skills and knowledge that they bring to the marketplace. This risk is true for GIS professionals too. The following is taken from “Prospect” – the UK graduate job site which describes the job prospects of cartographers: “With relatively low salary levels and small numbers of job vacancies, this role is often seen as more of a vocation for people with a strong interest in maps and geographical information.” Will the GI profession follow the same pattern?

For too many employers, the justification in employing GIS professionals is that the software used to create maps is very complex, so having specialists who produce maps is justified. But if it is possible to create maps with a simple API instead of buying an expensive and difficult to maintain Internet mapping server software, or if it is enough to analyse the data by creating a point map on Google Earth – then why keep the expensive professional?

Therefore, we need to change the question from the passive ‘Is GI a good career choice?’ to ‘how can we ensure that GI is a good career choice?’ There is a clear need to move away from the conception that GIS is all about making maps. It is actually about analysing geographical information, and in order to do this properly you need a GI analyst – a professional who understands the underlying data structures, the way in which the data can be manipulated and how to visualise the output of the analysis in a meaningful and effective way.

As for yourself, dear reader, if you are a GIS professional – it is worth considering how you structure your career so it does indeed become fulfilling, enjoyable and long. There aren’t many jobs in the IT sector that offer a variety of tasks like GI. Develop your skills by ongoing training – and while you are at it, why not become a Chartered Geographer? Read books that help in understanding how rapidly the world around you is changing – Thomas Friedman’s The World Is Flat (2007) is one of my favourites. Most importantly, start your own local campaign to explain to your employer, if you are working for an organisation that doesn’t specialises in GIS, or to your clients, if you are working in a GIcentric organisation, how special is spatial? And in what ways the knowledge and skills that you’ve got are contributing to the operation of the organisation. By collaborating and promoting the wonders of GI we can ensure that GI is indeed an excellent career choice.

The formatted version of this article is available here (Include Gesche Schmid comment – which reaches a similar conclusion).