What’s in your back yard? – the latest edition

The Environment Agency has released the new version of their ‘What’s In Your Back Yard?’ application, which allows you to find out about pollution incidents, water quality, and flood risk in your area. Similar to the rest of the website, it is still designed for 800×600 screen resolution, although not really – the legend spills to the bottom and requires scrolling down.

The application takes a lot of the new interaction metaphors that we’ve become accustomed to in Web Mapping 2.0 – slippy maps that can be panned easily, obtaining information by point and click on the map – unlike the cumbersome way in which it was handled in the previous version. There are also other improvements such as more data.

Yet, there remain some of the most common mistakes that I have pointed to in the past – the maps are still small and too generalised to really see what is in your area, they still have the weird scale statement at the top of the map (what does it means that the scale is 1:650,000?).

Also, notice that the slippy map implementation is such that, after you move the map, it disappears and then reappears – it takes about 3 seconds which is enough to make it difficult to relocate yourself on the map. That’s actually not a good implementation – the whole point of slippy maps is that only a small area of the screen is being refreshed, making it easy for users to keep the image in their short-term memory.
The last aspect that I would expect in such an application released in 2008 is the ability to download the data from the application (see the Power of Information report) or to have a well-controlled API as in OS OpenSpace.

So, it’s a move in the right direction, but a long way to go …