Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
To control the interactivity, only specific elements were clickable in the layouts at a
time. Layouts were kept in grey-scale to avoid any bias that may come from color
interactions.
Participants and Procedure
Students at secondary school level (n
¼
110, age 14-15 years, 61 female, 49 male)
were asked to complete predefined tasks using the prepared layouts in the user
study. The study was designed as a classroom experiment on desktop computers
within a standard 45-min lesson. Students had to fill out a digital questionnaire
delivered by a survey software (SelectSurvey.NET
1
) running in a web browser.
The experimental procedure was divided into four parts in which participants:
(A) delivered background information about themselves, (B) voted on useful atlas
tools and functions, (C) solved tasks in the five GUI layouts and judged their attractive-
ness and usability, and (D) assessed the “look and feel” of some specific atlas functions.
Since the study focused primarily on solving tasks using different layouts, part (C) will
be presented and discussed in more detail in the following sections of this paper.
The study started with a short introduction including general information about
atlases and instructions on the survey procedure. After this, each student launched
the digital survey individually and provided socio-metric and background informa-
tion (age, gender, formation level, frequency of computer/tablet usage, use of
computer games, and use of Internet maps) in part A of the online form. Part B
dealt with the usefulness of 17 atlas functions. Using a Likert scale ranging from
1 (not useful) to 7 (very useful), students were asked to judge functions such as
zooming, panning, printing, and querying. These feature questions were mainly
asked to familiarize the participants with typical atlas functions.
Part C—assessing different GUI layouts—was the core part of this study.
Before
solving tasks, students were asked to rate (without any additional information) the
visual attractiveness of our five layouts on a 7-step Likert scale. Following that,
students conducted five tasks in all five mock-up interfaces (i.e., the experiment was
designed as a within-subject study in which we obtained repeated measures). The
tasks represented typical use cases for thematic navigation, spatial orientation and
information queries in atlases:
1) Switch the map topic from “geology” to “raw materials”,
2) Resolve the meaning of map colors (gray shades) by means of the legend,
3) Query the name of the settlement and the underlying geological structure in the
center of the map,
4) Access any additional media (e.g. images, text) of the map, and
5) Find out where the displayed map region is located within Switzerland.
