Evaluating Human-Centered Approaches for Geovisualization

Working with two small group of domain experts in Leicestershire County Council David Lloyd's PhD evaluates human-centered approaches to application development which are applicable to geovisualization. These approaches range from field studies and contextual analysis of subjects' context to eliciting requirements using a template; mediating geovisualization to subjects with a lecture; mediating subjects' context of use to geovisualization experts using a scenario; autoethnography to understand the geovisualization design process; wireframe, paper and digital interactive prototyping with alternative protocols; and a decision making process for prioritising application improvement.

David found that the acquisition and use of real user data is key; that a template approach and teaching subjects about visualization tools and interactions both fail to elicit useful requirements for a visualization application. Consulting geovisualization experts with a scenario of user context and samples of user data does yield suggestions for tools and interactions of use to a visualization designer.

The complex and composite natures of both visualization and human-centered domains, incorporating learning from both domains, with user context, makes design challenging. Wireframe, paper and digital interactive prototypes mediate between the user and visualization domains successfully, eliciting exploratory behaviour and suggestions to improve prototypes. Paper prototypes are particularly successful at eliciting suggestions and especially novel visualization improvements. Decision-making techniques prove useful for prioritising different possible improvements, although domain subjects select data-related features over more novel alternative and rank these more inconsistently.

The research concludes that understanding subject context of use and data is important and occurs throughout the process of engagement with domain experts, and that standard requirements elicitation techniques are unsuccessful for geovisualization. Engagement with subjects at an early stage with simple prototypes incorporating real subject data and moving to successively more complex prototypes holds the best promise for creating successful geovisualization applications.

PhD and papers

Evaluating Human-Centered Approaches for Geovisualization David's PhD

Lloyd, D., Dykes, J. and Radburn, R., (2009), "Using the Analytic Hierarchy Process to prioritise candidate improvements to a geovisualization application", "Proceedings of GISRUK, 1-3 April, Durham, UK"

Lloyd. D, Dykes. J, Radburn. R, (2008), "Mediating geovisualization to potential users and prototyping a geovisualization application", "GIS Research UK 16th Annual Conference"

Lloyd. D, Dykes. J, Radburn. R, (2007), "Understanding geovisualization users and their requirements; a user-centred approach ", "GIS Research UK 15th Annual Conference" , (Adam C. Winstanley, Eds.), pp. 209-214, Maynooth, Ireland.