Abstract
Abstract. Organizations and individuals are becoming more aware of the benefits of geoinformation (GI) in supporting decision making. That being the case, there is a growing need to develop methods and technologies that make GI easily accessible, retrievable and usable to users. However, usability problems in GI web applications reportedly hinder users from effectively carrying out their intended operations. This paper contributes to a better understanding of GI-specific usability problems in GI web applications by: 1) Extracting usability problems from previous studies, 2) Classifying the problems, and 3) Identifying critical components of GI web applications. A systematic literature review approach is adopted to provide usability evaluation studies. 201 Usability problems were extracted from 12 studies, classified and qualitatively analysed. The results indicate a significant need for a GI specific usability framework, to provide support for GI specific usability evaluation and to provide generic solutions to reoccurring problems.
Highlights
Geoinformation has become the epitome of research and spatial decision-making
The results indicate a significant need for a GI specific usability framework, to provide support for GI specific usability evaluation and to provide generic solutions to reoccurring problems
The design, development and evaluation of GI web applications relies on the Human Computer Interaction (HCI) and software engineering principles
Summary
GI web applications have become increasingly available online, providing free access to geoinformation and services. GI web applications continue to suffer from low usability as there are no generic solutions to GI-specific usability problems (Henzen, 2018). Different usability evaluation methods are used, such as user testing and expert evaluation using eye tracking, user survey, user observation techniques and as of lately remote evaluation techniques have been embraced (Unrau & Kray, 2021). The usability evaluation test results should incite the development of generic solutions to recurring usability problems and improvement of usability evaluation methods. This research aims to collectively analyse usability issues to identify recurring GI-specific usability problems and critical GI web application components to provide input for the GI-specific usability pattern-based framework. The pattern-based framework is developed to provide generic solutions to GI usability problems
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