Interactive Web Maps: Usability Heuristics Proposal

Juliana Orro Marquez,Paulo Meirelles,Tiago Silva Da Silva

doi:10.5194/ica-proc-4-70-2021

Juliana Orro Marquez, Paulo Meirelles + Show 1 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.5194/ica-proc-4-70-2021

Copy DOI

Abstract

Abstract. With the evolution of technology, maps have changed how they are produced and consumed. In the 1990s, along with the internet uprise, printed and digital maps began to be shared and viewed on the web, which provided more significant user interaction with the map and geographic data. However, the ease of creating interactive maps using computational resources sometimes neglects cartographic concepts, impairing the interpretation of geographic data and the quality of the interaction between user and system. This work presents ten specific Usability Heuristics for Interactive Web Maps to identify and elaborate a set of criteria that help create and evaluate the quality of interactive web maps. For this, we used a methodology to develop domain-specific Usability Heuristics, composed of eight steps. This paper presents the ten heuristics elaborated along with the attributes of the name, ID, category and definition, and an additional checklist. This new set encompasses both the concepts of cartography and usability, contributing to better user interaction with the system and geographic data.

Highlights

With the evolution of technology, cartography has undergone significant advances provided by technological innovations, the spread of the internet, and electronic devices with integrated geolocation systems
Based on a survey carried out with professionals in cartography who work in the production of interactive maps on the web, the author presents the results identified for the analysis of the workflow, best practices, and evaluation of interactive maps practiced by these professionals
The methodology presented by Quiñones et al (2018) is composed of eight steps, of which five steps were performed; the results obtained in each step performed are presented below: In the Exploratory stage, elements were identified that presented information on: interactive web maps (Table 1, 2, 3), heuristic or usability attributes (Table 4, 5, 6) e heuristics or domain-specific relevant elements (Table 7)

Summary

Introduction

With the evolution of technology, cartography has undergone significant advances provided by technological innovations, the spread of the internet, and electronic devices with integrated geolocation systems. The ease of creating interactive maps using computational resources sometimes neglects cartographic concepts, impairing the interpretation of geographic data and the quality of interaction. Faced with this problem, recent studies in cartography reported the need to create guidelines for application in geographic visualization systems (Vincent et al, 2019, Roth et al, 2017). One of them is the Heuristic Evaluation, an inspection method that analyzes a product or interface to identify usage problems This method is fast, cheap, and practical to verify and predict possible failures in the user-system interaction

Objectives

Methods

Results

Conclusion