Web-based Geographic Information Systems and their Usability

Usability of web-based geographic information systems (GIS) applications is very important because these applications are mostly focused on end users, i.e. on people who may have only a very limited knowledge of GIS, if any. Many various usability evaluation methods have been developed. Some of them involve real users or their representatives, some of them are based only on GIS experts evaluation. Advantage of deploying real users or at least their representatives is clear – they even can identify usability problems which need not to be identified as usability problems by experts. On the other side, usability evaluation in a real situation done by real users is quite difficult. Experimental user usability testing done by representatives of users is a next possibility. In this case environment is artificial and the whole experiment must be precisely conducted and controlled. In any case usability testing method must be precisely proposed for the given situation and conditions. Aim of the paper is to propose a suitable usability user testing method to evaluate 14 equal web-based GIS applications (all run by the Czech Regional Authorities and targeted at citizens and other end users). The main aim of proposed evaluation is to identify the most serious usability problems of the evaluated applications. The identified problems are described in the end of the paper. Key-Words: Web-based GIS, Usability, GIS, eGovernment, Information Society.