Mondays, 10:00 - 12:00, room No. 255.

Scenario

Authorities of all levels are building geospatial web service in order to improve information dissemination, public services or integrating citizens into planning processes. As a result, these systems are more and more used by novices and untrained users without prior GIS knowledge. It has been shown that GIS tools and terminology negatively impact the effectiveness, efficiency and satisfaction of those persons or even prevent them from working with GIS at all. Therefore, usability evaluations of these systems are critical for the integration of GIS processes into new domains. On key issue in this context is that the majority of current approaches does not reveal in-depth insights into workflows. One potential way to address this, is a combination of remote and asynchronous logging of user interactions and visual analysis of session data. Examples in this area include

 

• https://analytics.google.com/analytics/web/demoAccount
• https://maptiks.com/features.html

 

In this study project students will conceptualize and implement mechanisms for logging user interaction data in a WebGIS client as well as interactive visualization dashboards for the analysis of session data through experts. The following research questions are addressed:

 

1. Which data about user interactions and map-related tasks should be extracted and persisted at which level of detail to support usability analysis?
2. How can this information be visualized to enable an in-depth evaluation of user interactions and strategies in WebGIS sessions?
3. Which types of interactions with these visualizations facilitate new insights for decision makers?

 

Students will develop a WebGIS client application for urban planning. Within this application the appropriate data must be harvested and sent to a persistence layer (probably Elasticsearch). In a second application, this data will be retrieved to build a dashboard-like representation of sessions. The data will have to be preprocessed to summarize numerical statistics and highlight patterns as well as anomalies. Furthermore, the developed visualizations should allow WebGIS providers and developers to explore sessions and user interactions in detail to incorporate domain knowledge and facilitate deep insights.

 

Schedule

Biweekly meetings on Friday. Final presentation two weeks after end of lectures.

Phase	Date	Topics
kickoff	10/12/2018	Long session (~4 hours) organisation (dates, participants) introduction to usability and visual analytics defining specific goal of study project introduction to scrum assignment to groups development of ideas and user studies planning of first sprint
implementation	10/26/2018	readjustment of groups if required presentation of ideas, tools and technologies assignment of papers for presentation feedback, help and discussion
implementation	11/09/2018	short presentation of sprint results and outlook presentation of papers feedback, help and discussion
implementation	11/23/2018	short presentation of sprint results and outlook presentation of papers feedback, help and discussion
implementation	12/07/2018	short presentation of sprint results and outlook presentation of papers feedback
implementation	12/21/2018	short presentation of sprint results and outlook presentation of papers feedback
implementation	01/18/2019	short presentation of sprint results and outlook feedback
quality assurance	02/01/2019	short presentation of sprint results feedback
release	02/15/2019	final group presentations

 

Groups

If there are more than 8 participants multiple groups will work on the same task.

 

The group’s task will be the implementation of an interactive session exploration and analysis tool for usability evaluation. Map interactions, features access and manipulation as well as tool usage data should be displayed. Thereby, aggregated visualizations for general usage and tools for investigating single sessions should be provided. The concrete data will be provided (either from a previous study or artificial data) as well as the requirements towards the developed visualizations.

 

Delivery

Both groups have to deliver:

1. Individual report (40% of grade)
2. Final group presentation and demo of results (60% of grade)

Kurs im HIS-LSF