Christopher Parker's presentation in the 2nd Workdshop on usability of geographic information, 23rd March 2010 at UCL, London. See details at http://www.virart.nottingham.ac.uk/GI%20Usability/index.html

1. CHARACTERISTICS OF VGI STAKEHOLDERS
Christopher J. Parker
www.UserGeneratedDesign.co.uk

2. OUTLINE
1. Introduction
2. Methodology
3. Characteristics of
Stakeholders
4. Conclusion
5. Future Research
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3. 1 INTRODUCTION
 Need to understand Stakeholders to understand usability
(Gould, Lewis 1985, ISO 1998, Tulloch 2008)
 Who they are
 How do they interact
 What are their motivations
 User requirements
 To better understand what VGI actually is (Elwood 2008,
Crampton 2008, Livingstone 1992)
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4. 2 METHODOLOGY
 15 respondents sourced
from all stakeholder
categories
 Semi structured interviews
 In depth analysis with NVivo
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 Analysed transcripts for 208
salient themes
 Compared stakeholder
groups against one another
 Creation of a Rich Picture
from results
4

5. 2 DIFFERENT FORMS OF STAKEHOLDER
(COOTE, RACKHAM 2008)
 Consumers
 “A Person who make a decision to use a
product or service for personal use”
 Special Interest Mapping Groups
 “Individuals who come together to
collaboratively achieve some shared
mapping goal”
 Local Communities
 “Local people who have a common desire to
protect and improve their local area”
 Professionals
 “Stakeholders who are employed by
organisations that use geographic data to
perform their business activities, whether to
analyse, report, navigate or otherwise
maintain systems.” 5

6. 3 Usability Profiles:
Need to understand Stakeholders to
understand usability (Gould, Lewis 1985, ISO
1998, Tulloch 2008)
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7. Usability Profiles:
CONSUMERS
 Desire ‘completeness’
 Chose product to
facilitate activities
 Utilise end products of
Traditional and
Neogeographic projects
 Apply personal
requirements to all
products
 All have unique
requirements and
preferences 7

8. Usability Profiles:
SPECIAL INTEREST MAPPING GROUPS
 Enjoy freedom with
data
 Producing something
unique to their
product
 ‘communist’ organisation in all
members have the same voice
 Work towards a greater goal
AND own goals in projects
 Like benefiting others
 Strong bias towards their map
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product.

9. Usability Profiles:
COMMUNITIES
 Enjoy freedom
 Utilise their projects
map
 Community focused
 Co-operate any agencies
to achieve their goals
 No express product
development for
externals
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10. Usability Profiles:
PROFESSIONALS
 Need data sets to be
‘complete’ across
their entire work
area.
 Motivation of using
data is increasing
business position
 Either VGI focused or PGI
focused
 Both groups affected by
external influences
 VGI offers a ‘mind of the user’
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11. 4 CONCLUSION
 There are salient differences between stakeholder
groups' perceptions
 VGI has a great potential to add value when it fills holes
in ‘proprietary maps’
 People have an emotional connection with helping
others through contribution (e.g. Haiti Map) and sharing
experiences
 Important aspects for stakeholder usability extends
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beyond ‘does it do X and Y’ and into ‘human factors’

12. 5 FUTURE RESEARCH
 2 further studies in my PhD focusing on
the consumer use of VGI
 Differences between perceptions of VGI
and PGI as concepts
 What is the added value to ‘professional
generated information’ by including VGI?
 Further illustrate the strengths and
weakness in VGI and PGI
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13. 13
www.UserGeneratedDesign.co.uk

14. REFERENCES
COOTE, A. and RACKHAM, L., 2008. Neogeography Data Quality - is it an
issue? AGI Geocommunity '08, 23-25 September 2008 2008,
Association for Geographic Information (AGI).
CRAMPTON, J.W., 2008. Cartography: maps 2.0. Progress in human
geography, 33(1), 91-100.
ELWOOD, S., 2008. Geographic Information Science: new geovisualisation
technologies emerging questions and linkages with GIScience research.
Progress in human geography, 33(2), 256-263.
GOULD, J.D. and LEWIS, C., 1985. Designing for usability: key principles
and what designers think. Communications of the ACM, 28(3), 300-311.
ISO, 1998. ISO 9241-11:1998. Ergonomic requirements for offce work with
visual display terminals (VDT)s - Part 11 Guidence on usability. ISO edn.
ISO.
LIVINGSTONE, D.N., 1992. In defence of situated messiness: geographical
knowledge and the history of science. GeoJournal, 26(2), 228-229.
TULLOCH, D.L., 2008. Is VGI participation? From vernal pools to video
games. GeoJournal, 72, 161-171. 14