Usability Problems in GI Web Applications: A lesson from Literature

Abstract. Organizations and individuals are becoming more aware of the benefits of geoinformation (GI) in supporting decision making. That being the case, there is a growing need to develop methods and technologies that make GI easily accessible, retrievable and usable to users. However, usability problems in GI web applications reportedly hinder users from effectively carrying out their intended operations. This paper contributes to a better understanding of GI-specific usability problems in GI web applications by: 1) Extracting usability problems from previous studies, 2) Classifying the problems, and 3) Identifying critical components of GI web applications. A systematic literature review approach is adopted to provide usability evaluation studies. 201 Usability problems were extracted from 12 studies, classified and qualitatively analysed. The results indicate a significant need for a GI specific usability framework, to provide support for GI specific usability evaluation and to provide generic solutions to reoccurring problems.