Frank Hardisty, Alan MacEachren and Gouray Cai, GeoVISTA Center, Department of Geography, Pennsylvania State University, 302 Walker Building, University Park, PA 16801. Email: fah109@psu.edu

Applying Usability Engineering to Visualization Design Problems

Abstract

Cartographers are interested in creating visualization systems, especially interactive ones. Cartographic research into such issues as animation and visualizing uncertainty has found that user interface design and implementation can be crucial to the user's ability to extract information or create hypotheses. How, then, can we create effective user interfaces? One strategy is to examine the literature on usability engineering, especially usability engineering for software, and determine how much of it is applicable to geographic visualization environments. This paper reports the results of such an investigation, detailing the strengths and weaknesses of various usability engineering approaches, and contrasting this approach with current cartographic theories. Usability engineering approaches from the Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) literature considered here include the Soft Systems Methodology (SSM), Open Systems Task Analysis (OSTA), Multiview, and the star life cycle approaches.

Keywords: Cartography, Visualization, HCI