Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
Overall, we deem the competitive analysis as successful in meeting the
project goals. First, we were able to identify and assess current practices in
water level visualization, such as the use of a blue gradient in flood-centric
representations, the inclusion of a common set of basemap and context
options, the widespread support of the pan, zoom, overlay, retrieve, and filter
interaction operators, and the general move away from web mapping techno-
logies using proprietary plugins to those leveraging modern web standards.
Second, we were able to identify unique solutions that potentially represent
unmet user needs, including representation of exposed as well as flooded
land, design of a flood representation that does not obfuscate the area of
interest, provision of an informative overview at small cartographic scales,
representation of multiple kinds of uncertainties, inclusion of meaningful and
memorable benchmarks, and support of the reexpress, sequence, and annotate
interaction operators. Finally, the competitive analysis helped to identify
important gaps between theory and practice, namely the relative lack of
uncertainty communication across the reviewed tools, the overall separation
of tools designed to manage the build or human landscape from those
designed to manage the natural or physical landscape, and the surprising
implementation of filter rather than search for a public-facing visualization
tool. Notably, the higher-level distinction between representation and inter-
action proved to be a useful way for coding the similarities and differences
across the evaluated set of water level visualization tools; we anticipate that
this distinction will be remain useful when completing a competitive analysis
of visualization tools purposed for a different domain.
The competitive analysis represents the first stage in a broader user-
centered design and development process for the NOAA Lake Level Viewer.
Insights generated through the competitive analysis currently are being com-
bined with stakeholder feedback received through a set of needs assessment
interviews to generate a first draft of a requirements document. Two addi-
tional stages of user feedback are planned in the future: a cognitive
walkthrough study on wireframe designs of the Lake Level Viewer and an
interaction study on an alpha version of the tool. The Lake Level Viewer is
expected to be published online at the end of 2014.
Acknowledgments The research was supported by the U.S. National Oceanic & Atmospheric
Administration through Award #167152.
References
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Angel J, Kunkel K (2010) The response of Great Lakes water levels to future climate scenarios
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