Building a Framework of Usability Patterns for Web Applications in Spatial Data Infrastructures

Abstract

Web applications in spatial data infrastructures (SDIs) should provide robust and user-friendly user interfaces for geoinformation (GI) discovery, analysis, and usage. Poor usability, e.g., caused by unsuitable information presentation or inappropriate (non) availability of functions, can result in inefficient or faulty usage and can increase the acceptance of the application and provided geoinformation. Until now, a number of usability problems in GI web applications were identified; however, methods to summarize these problems, to provide (software-independent) solutions for them, and to find pairs of problems and related solutions hardly exist. We propose an adapted usability pattern concept for web applications in SDIs to map and categorize usability problems and best practice solutions and we enable a GI context-specific creation and discovery of these problems and solutions. The concept includes developed pattern types, relationships, and rules on how to use the relationships for the different pattern types.