Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
Qualitative information analysis focused on evaluating the most preferred visu-
alization of the presented maps and on preferences for selected map symbols.
Preferences are shown in Fig.
3b
and reveal that most users prefer GM
s map
visualization, especially in its newest version. Tested symbology concerned map
signs for a school and for a cinema. Figure
3c
demonstrates that users prefer BM
'
s
symbology. There was no difference in preferences between male and female
participants.
Users were also asked to reveal which map portals they use in everyday life.
Options included the tested map portals as well as Mapy.cz, the favoured map
portal in the Czech Republic. Mapy.cz was not a tested portal because we chose to
concentrate on international map portals which are used world-wide. An interesting
result is that almost all respondents use GM and Mapy.cz, but only 8.7 % of them
work with BM and only 2.3 % use MQ. The popularity of GM may be explained by
the amount of the data provided for the Czech Republic (or Europe), since the other
map portals focus more on the USA. Another question was aimed at discovering the
reasons respondents use map portals. The majority of respondents answered that
they use map portals for searching addresses and routes, planning trips and looking
for points of interest. An interesting result is that a large number of users (24.8 %)
use topographic maps but not orthophotomaps.
Another subjective aspect related directly to Fig.
2
may be the map skeleton. The
figures illustrate that the main orientation objects are rivers, parks and main roads
on GM and BM, and the road network on MQ. The base map changes automatically
when zooming on BM, which can cause changes in map orientation and thus
confuse users.
The map content varies on each map and it is changing very quickly. During
work on this study, the map content changed several times. For example, the point
symbol categories on GM were reduced.
'
Quantitative Data/Research
Quantitative data provides more objective information, and so we focused on this
data in the following parts of the test. First it was found out that the size of labels
differs among the portals. It may be observed that the labels on MQ are rather small
in comparison to labels on GM and BM. Moreover, labels on BM are dispropor-
tionate, so they overlap and obscure the content of the map itself. On GM,
additional information about objects is provided using mouseover. The analysis
of label size shows that labels in GM are the most usable ones. Another problem
with BM is the layer order, which does not follow cartographic rules and makes the
map less usable.
The chart in Fig.
3a
shows the number of correct answers. Tasks focusing on
map labels (tasks 5 and 6) proved that only 44.9 % of respondents were able to
answer the question about city labelling correctly on BM (task 5), which confirmed
