Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
alternative GUI designs. With the digital Atlas of Switzerland, user experiments
have already been conducted with silver surfers, and internal feedback was obtained
for this age group. However, atlases are often used in schools, as they constitute an
important part of geography education (H
¨
berling and Hurni
2013
). As entire topic
are written on the subject (e.g., Palfrey and Gasser
2011
), understanding the needs
of digital natives in terms of their interface expectations, design requirements and
needs may be a worthwhile endeavor both from fundamental science perspective
(observing their spatial behavior) and from an applied science perspective (for
obtaining design guidelines). From a design perspective, the goal would be to
find what works best, and if possible, why—and so that, the principles applied in
one GUI design can be possibly transferred to other GUI designs for digital atlases.
In sum, our study was motivated by the reasoning that (a) atlases are extremely
information-rich, therefore the GUIs need careful consideration, and (b) the digital
atlas GUIs need to be designed also for the younger generations. This could mean
not only avoiding the “old-fashioned” style, but also supporting interaction patterns
they are familiar with. To enable the exploration of thematic content for this user
group, novel concepts, visualization means and GUIs must be considered. We
cannot assume that the youth have a similar expertise level as silver surfers; yet,
digital natives may have other strengths. Motivated by this reasoning, we evaluate
five alternative visualizations, each tested with five typical
to answer
the questions, “which layout design facilitates the best exploration and why?”,
“which layout design is preferred by the participants and why?” and “what can
we learn from this experiment in terms of atlas GUI designs?”.
atlas tasks
'
'
Related Work
User interface issues linked to geographic visualizations have been studied from
various aspects (e.g., layout design, interaction design, integrating multivariate
information to map displays, visualizations themselves as interfaces) as the disci-
pline made the transition from static maps towards interactive, on-demand
geovisualization services (e.g., Howard and MacEachren
1996
; MacEachren
et al.
1997
;¸¨ ltekin
2002
). More than a decade ago, MacEachren and Kraak
(
2001
) have acknowledged user interface design as a research challenge in
geovisualization. At the same time, Cartwright et al. (
2001
) have detailed the issues
and challenges
about
the interface design for geographic visualizations based on a
set of priorities for interface design that were defined by the members of Interna-
tional Cartographic Association
s Commission on Visualization and Virtual Envi-
ronments. Cartwright et al. (
2001
) list a number of challenges that are relevant for
designing interfaces in particular for geographic visualizations. They ask “Can
geovisualization products offer too much information?” (Cartwright et al.
2001
),
implicitly making a reference to
information overload
(Ruff
2002
), a concept that
has strong relevance to information-rich geographic visualization environments,
such as digital atlases (Polys et al.
2007
).
'
