Maps and GIS have historically been difficult for users due to their complexity, requiring technical knowledge and exposing internal structures rather than using intuitive interfaces. While web mapping has improved usability with features like responsive design and simplified interfaces, issues remain around communicating uncertainty, adjusting to different platforms, and ensuring data is fit for various uses and users, from administrators to developers to general audiences. Continued focus on user-centered design principles is needed to make geographic information and systems truly usable.

1. Maps are wonderful, but GIS are hard to use.
What can we do about it?
Muki Haklay
M.haklay@ucl.ac.uk, Department of Civil, Environment and Geomatic
Engineering, UCL

2. Outline
• Maps – brief history
• GIS development and the 5+ years gap
• Neogeography, Web Mapping 2.0, SatNavs etc.
• Geographic Information usability
• Where should we go next?

3. Humans and spatial representation
http://www.phil.uni-passau.de/histhw/tutcarto/english/index-hiwi-
karto-en.html
http://hyperbolic-crochet.blogspot.com/2010/09/talking-and-writing-about-
math.html
Sailing maps/Navigation charts Western Pacific
Peabody Museum, Cambridge)
Valcamonica, Italy. Neolithic
Bronze age (6000 BCE)

4. Carved wooden coastal charts carried in
their kayaks by Greenland Inuit (Eskimo)
(n.d.) Courtesy of the Greenland National
Museum & Archives.
http://www.learner.org/courses/amerhistory/interactives/cartographic/1-2.html
• Representations of
geography predate
the development of
writing by at least
2000 years (some
20,000)
• Moreover, they exist
in non-literate
societies, and semi-
literate people
routinly participate in
mapping activities

5. The development of geographical
representations in digital computers
1993 1990
Source: Tsue 2007

6. Early computing and GIS
• First commercial
application of
computers (LEO I)
1951
• Harvard Laboratory
for Computer Graphics
1963 (Symap)
Images courtesy of Carl Steinitz

7. Geospatial technologies continue to lag...
• Commercial relational
DBMS (Oracle)1978
• Commercial desktop
CAD (AutoCAD) 1982
• Commercial GIS
(ARC/INFO) 1982
• First desktop GIS
(Mapinfo) 1986
• First commercial
spatial DBMS (Oracle)
c. 1996

8. Why are GIS hard to use?

9. Why are GIS hard to use?

10. Why are GIS hard to use?

11. Why are GIS hard to use?
• As Identified by Traynor and Williams (1995):
– GIS is complex: it is based on knowledge from
Geography, Cartography, Databases, Statistics,
Computer algorithms and data structures…
– Requires users to have or acquire considerable
technical knowledge in order to operate the system
• In addition, developers and vendors are focusing
on functionality and not on ease of use with
interfaces that are exposing the system’s
structure – and not matching the user’s model
Traynor and Williams (1995) ‘Why are Geographic Information Systems hard to use?’

12. Source: Skarlatidou, 2005

13. Web Mapping (1.0)

14. Source: Shand 2002

17. Web Mapping 1.0 – user issues
• Some issues were caused by infrastructure:
– Limited bandwidth, which was problematic for image-
based information
– Limited screen size
• And some by designers and developers:
– Copying desktop GIS to the web
– Paper based cartography, scanned
– Banner ads, headers – misuse of screen assets

18. Web Mapping 2.0
• Size
• Response time (AJAX, pre rendered tiles)
• Simplified interface
• Cartography

19. Mashups
ChicagoCrime.org – one of the
first Google Maps Mashups

22. Web Mapping 2.0 and usability
• More awareness to usability (likely influence from
other areas of web practice)
• Bandwidth and development practices improve
User Experience
• Cartography adapted to computer monitors

24. GI Usability

25. Different roles, thus different users of
• System Administrator - Managing the GI in the
organisation on a regular basis, deals with
updates and integration of data
• Developer - developing applications that use
geographical information
• Power user – GIS professional, use GI daily
• General user – Use GIS and GI occasionally

26. Typology of users
Type No. of participants Issue for GIS
System
Administrator
Significant skills, database
administration focus
Developers Significant Skills,
information manipulation
and analysis
Power users Knowledge of GIS,
knowledge of GI
General users Wide range of skills, limited
knowledge of GIS –
‘accidental geographers’

27. System Administrator’s view of GI
• Importing and managing geographic datasets
• Providing GI to a wide range of users and
applications
• Ensuring smooth
delivery and integration
with a range of GIS
products
Source: C4

28. Case study – OS MasterMap Change-Only
Update
• When OS MasterMap launched, Change-Only
Update was promoted as an efficient method to
update local datasets – remove an old record and
insert a new one
• Challenges: Integration with other data layers,
topology, auditing of changes, etc.
• Results: specialised data products, some users
prefer updating the whole set

29. Developer’s view of GI
• Using GI within an application
• Concerns: clarity of data structure, fitness for
purpose (for example routing),
impact on performances
• Working with a specific system
which relies on GI, not always
aware that 95% of investment
(and issues) is in data

30. Case study – DXF, Shapefiles, KML
• Several formats were suggested for geographic
information – National Transfer Format (NTF),
Spatial Data Transfer Standards (SDTS),
Geographic Markup Language (GML)
• Yet at each period, an ad-hoc format dominates –
1990s – DXF, late 1990s – Shapefile, mid 2000s –
KML
• Notice that formats are not optimised but
relatively easy to learn

31. Case study – APIs OSM vs. OGC WMS
• OpenStreetMap API:
http://api.openstreetmap.org/api/0.5/map?bbox=-
71.00,42.00,-72.00,43.00
• OGC WFS API:
http://example.com/wfs?
service=WFSSIMPLE&version=0.5&REQUEST=GetFeature&BBOX=-
71.00,42.00,-72.00,43.00&TIME=2006-09-12/2006-09-
22&OUTPUTFORMAT=text/xml
Haklay, M. And Weber, P., 2008, OpenStreetMap – User Generated Street Map, IEEE Pervasive

32. Power user’s view of GI
• Integrating data for a specific task
• Familiar with GIS operations but sometime
not with the semantics of
the datasets (what they
actually mean)
• Map visualisation and
presentation of datasets
is quite central to the job

33. Case study – knowing what is in the data
• Metadata is necessary for finding data, but more
crucially for using it. Users are far more likely to
use information inside
the organisation than
to try and find it from
outside.
• Maintaining metadata
is not easy – even
within a project!
Source: MapWindow GIS

34. General user’s view of GI
• GI is used as part of another task - navigation in
order to get to a location, answering a request
from a client about store location.
• GI is seen as authoritative,
factual, and up to date.
• Geographic and cartographic
concepts are unproblematic
and/or trivial.

35. Case study – SatNav
‘A 20-year-old student's car was wrecked by a
train after she followed her SatNav onto a
railway track. Paula Ceely, second year student
at Birmingham University was driving her Renault
Clio from Redditch, Worcestershire,
to see her boyfriend at his parents'
home in Carmarthenshire for the
first time.’ She was trying to cross the
line in the dark when she heard a train
horn, realised she was on the track,
and the train smashed into the car.’
Http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/wales/south_west/6646331.stm

36. Usability of GI – the needs of different users
• GI is critical for geographical applications, but
received little or no attention in terms of
interaction design
• There are different aspects for system managers,
developers, power users and general users, but
all require some attention from producers and
providers of GI – even if the process is in-house
• Developers need to be aware of these aspects

37. Usability of GI/GIS – summary
• Some issues are long standing : screen size and
resolution, bandwidth, interaction speed,
communicating uncertainty, cartography
• Need to adjust to different platforms and media
• Web Mapping 2.0 applications are moving in the
right directions
• New issues with Geographical Information

38. Further reading
• Blog: povesham.wordpress.com
• Academic Publications:
povesham.wordpress.com/publications/
• M.haklay@ucl.ac.uk