How Useful Is Usability for Geovisualization ?

Usability Studies in Geovisualization

Usability frameworks used in geovisualization can vary greatly, due to the structure of usability evaluations being driven by circumstances and resources. This raises such questions as ‘can generic frameworks be created to apply to geovisualization tools whether it be in a formative or summative study?’ And are there common themes that are produced from these diverse studies? Examples of usabil...

Cognitive and Usability Issues in Geovisualization

We provide a research agenda for the International Cartographic Association’s Commission on Visualization and Virtual Environment working group on Cognitive and Usability Issues in Geovisualization. Developments in hardware and software have led to (and will continue to stimulate) novel methods for visualizing geospatial data. It is our belief that these novel methods will be of little use if t...

Usability Testing for Improving Interactive Geovisualization Techniques

Combining Usability Techniques to Design Geovisualization Tools for Epidemiology.

Designing usable geovisualization tools is an emerging problem in GIScience software development. We are often satisfied that a new method provides an innovative window on our data, but functionality alone is insufficient assurance that a tool is applicable to a problem in situ. As extensions of the static methods they evolved from, geovisualization tools are bound to enable new knowledge creat...

Building Task-Ontologies for GeoVisualization

This short position paper proposes a task-ontological approach to geovisualization. Two recently identified challenges in geovisualization research justify such an endeavor, particularly for the webenabled domain: (1) the need for developing task-driven tools to facilitate problem solving and knowledge sharing amongst heterogeneous user communities, and (2) the lack of sound evaluation procedur...