The Geographic Information System (GIS) field has
experienced a significant development with the spread of
World Wide Web (WWW). And the public web mapping sites are not unfamiliar for people any more, the increasing
users inspired more attentions from researchers. Since the
gaps between users and software developers always led to
resources waste, the studies on usability becomes necessary.
Usability engineering (UE) is a method to describe methods
for analysing and enhancing the usability of software (Nielsen, 1994). Researchers generally used the UE method
to study users’ requirements and gained the guides for
interactive maps. The User-Centred Design (UCD), however,
is an approach throughout the entire life cycle of a system
(ISO, 1999) and will achieve the needs of users. The process
of UCD mostly can be seen as an iterative process. Moreover,
the UCD usually referred to Human-Computer Interaction
(HCI) methods. Both of them can help improve the usability
of the interactive systems, so the methods above effects a
positive role in usability studies of public web mapping sites.
In this research, UE method and the user testing was
employed to explore usability problems of four public web
mapping sites, analyzed the problems quantitatively and
provided guidelines for future design based on the test
results.
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