Usability studies of geovisualization software in the workplace

• Authors: Trudy A. Suchan
• Venue: dg.o '02 Proceedings of the 2002 annual national conference on Digital government research
• Year: 2002

"Quality Graphics for Federal Statistical Agencies" is a three-year project funded by the National Science Foundation (under the Digital Government Program) and eight federal agencies. The project research objectives are to develop and assess software that will enable data exploration by federal-agency users (who are evaluating data quality and looking for trends in data) and that will communicate statistical summaries to the public. Of the larger research project, this paper covers one part: Census Bureau participation with The Pennsylvania State University in usability studies of software for geographic data visualization. The Census Bureau is working with the university researchers to provide early feedback, even as the researchers are creating and evaluating a variety of tools for visual representation, that ultimately federal agencies can share. Analysts at the Census Bureau were interviewed for information on types of data and analysis tools currently used and for opinions on geovisualization tools that would support their data exploration and analysis tasks. This paper discusses the workplace interview as a data-gathering technique. It reports the interview results, to-wit, users would like to explore their demographic data in adjacent and more remote geographic context, as time series, in conjunction with other variables, would like to be able to compare results of two models and see their differing effects in different geographic regions, and more. Even at early stages of software development, Census Bureau analysts need to be able to explore their own data (not a test data set). That function will be added to the geovisualization tools and analysts again will be interviewed as the next step in the iterative software development and usability checks.