Usability evaluation for geographic information systems: a systematic literature review

ABSTRACT

The growing dissemination of geographic information systems (GIS) in recent years has increased the availability and use of geospatial tools. Despite this trend in GIS, usability is often not considered, and studies on usability are relatively rare. However, it has been shown that the effectiveness, efficiency and user satisfaction of these tools when used for geospatial tasks may be impacted by their design and terminology. In this article, we present a comprehensive review of the relevant literature. We analyze and compare publications of GIS usability evaluations, the methods that were used, and the findings reported. We thus produce a more detailed picture of GIS usability evaluations. Our contributions are (1) an overview of methods applied in case studies for evaluating the usability of GIS; (2) the identification of gaps and resulting weaknesses of previous studies; and (3) challenges and opportunities for future GIS usability studies. Our findings reveal a lack of usability guidelines for GIS, a lack of methods for analyzing complex workflows, and a lack of usage studies over longer periods of time. These contributions can help GIS developers and designers to improve the usability of their systems.

KEYWORDS:

• WebGIS
• usability
• evaluation methods
• literature review
• user interface

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. https://ec.europa.eu/digital-single-market/en/legislative-measures (accessed 28 November 2018).

2. https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/government-transformation-strategy-2017-to-2020 (accessed 28 November 2018).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

René Unrau

René Unrau is a PhD student at the Institute of Geoinformatics at the University of Münster, Germany. He received his Masters in Geoinformatics from the University of Münster in 2016 and works as a software engineer for web-based geographic information systems (WebGIS) at con terra in Münster. His research interests are usability evaluation methods for WebGIS and Visual Analytics.He is especially interested in remote and asynchronous evaluation approaches as well as tools for visually investigating map interaction data.

Christian Kray

Christian Kray is a professor in Geoinformatics at the Institute of Geoinformatics (ifgi) in Münster, Germany. He leads the Situated Computing Lab (sitcom) at ifgi, which focuses on research into location-based and situated systems, evaluation methods for mobile systems and innovative interaction with spatial concepts. Before coming to Münster, Chris was a senior lecturer at the School of Computing Science at Newcastle University, UK, and a postdoctoral researcher at InfoLab 21, Lancaster, UK. He holds a PhD in Computer Science from Saarland University, Germany.