Abstract
Abstract. Due to the increased availability of geospatial data, web-based geographic information systems (WebGIS) have become more popular in recent years. However, the usability of these systems poses new challenges as user interactions are strongly affected by the map and are thus different from interactions with traditional user interface elements. In this paper, we propose a method for evaluating the usability of web-based geographic information systems by analyzing user intentions through map interaction patterns. We use a pattern mining algorithm to extract frequent interaction sequences from user sessions and label these with their interaction semantics that represent the users’ immediate intentions. To evaluate our approach, we conducted a user study with 60 participants in a WebGIS scenario and identified varying user strategies for a selection task based on two different geovisualizations. Our results indicate that the chosen approach can uncover the underlying intentions of users’ interaction patterns and facilitate insights into the usability of WebGIS.
Highlights
The increased availability of geospatial data, public participation initiatives, and the technical capabilities of modern web browsers have led to the proliferation of web-based geographic information systems (WebGIS) across multiple platforms in recent years
We only investigate a small set of map interactions, our approach is the first step towards a usability assessment for WebGIS based on map interaction semantics
The evaluation of map interaction patterns is critical for usability assessment in web-based geographic information systems because they differ from interactions with traditional user interfaces (UIs) elements
Summary
The increased availability of geospatial data, public participation initiatives, and the technical capabilities of modern web browsers have led to the proliferation of web-based geographic information systems (WebGIS) across multiple platforms (mobile and desktop) in recent years. The variety of WebGIS contents and applications has grown and includes, for example, extensive map search engines like Google Maps for contemporary points of interests, fully-featured map builder and exploration tools like the ArcGIS Map Viewer for businesses and organizations as well as open government initiatives for citizen participation in urban planning processes (Rall et al, 2019) Some of these systems with extensive functionality may require complex user interfaces while, for example, a visualization of search results is only built for simple purposes (Fechner et al, 2015; Lobo et al, 2015; Roth and MacEachren, 2016). As a result, designing WebGIS UIs is difficult and requires evaluation approaches that go beyond efficiency and effectiveness to evaluate the usability (Rzeszewski and Kotus, 2019; Poplin et al, 2017; Kiefer et al, 2017)
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