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International Conference on Geographic Information Science

AGILE 2019: Geospatial Technologies for Local and Regional Development pp 327–348Cite as

Towards a Usability Scale for Participatory GIS

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Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Geoinformation and Cartography ((LNGC))

Abstract

Since its emergence in the 1990s, the area of Participatory GIS (PGIS) has generated numerous interactive mapping tools to support complex planning processes. The need to involve non-expert users makes the usability of these tools a crucial aspect that contributes to their success or failure. While many approaches and procedures have been proposed to assess usability in general, to date there is no standardized way to measure the overall usability of a PGIS. For this purpose, we introduce the Participatory GIS Usability Scale (PGUS), a questionnaire to evaluate the usability of a PGIS along five dimensions (user interface, spatial interface, learnability, effectiveness, and communication). The questionnaire was developed in collaboration with the user community of SeaSketch, a web-based platform for marine spatial planning. PGUS quantifies the subjective perception of usability on a scale between 0 and 100, facilitating the rapid evaluation and comparison between PGIS. As a case study, the PGUS was used to collect feedback from 175 SeaSketch users, highlighting the usability strengths and weaknesses of the platform.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    http://www.ppgis.net/resources/geoweb-applications—All URLs were accessed in November 2018 and can be found on the Wayback Machine at https://archive.org/web.

  2. 2.

    https://www.commonplace.is, https://www.seasketch.org.

  3. 3.

    See for example ESRI’s apps at http://www.esri.com/software/apps.

  4. 4.

    http://github.com/andrea-ballatore/pgis-usability.

  5. 5.

    http://www.seasketch.org.

  6. 6.

    http://uxmyths.com.

  7. 7.

    http://www.seasketch.org.

  8. 8.

    For a complete and updated list of projects, see http://www.seasketch.org/projects.

  9. 9.

    http://uservoice.com.

  10. 10.

    http://github.com/andrea-ballatore/pgis-usability.

  11. 11.

    The survey was disseminated on October 19, 2015, with a reminder on October 26.

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Acknowledgements

We thank Noah Gluschankoff (University of California, Santa Barbara) for his work on the questionnaire, and the SeaSketch users for their detailed feedback on the early drafts. Initial funding and support for SeaSketch have been provided by Esri, the New Zealand Department of Conservation, and The Tindall Foundation.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Geography, Birkbeck, University of London, London, UK

    Andrea Ballatore

  2. Marine Science Institute, University of California, Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, CA, USA

    Will McClintock & Grace Goldberg

  3. Department of Geography, Center for Spatial Studies, University of California, Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, CA, USA

    Werner Kuhn

Authors
  1. Andrea Ballatore
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  2. Will McClintock
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  3. Grace Goldberg
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  4. Werner Kuhn
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Andrea Ballatore .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Civil Engineering and Geomatics, Cyprus University of Technology, Limassol, Cyprus

    Phaedon Kyriakidis

  2. Department of Civil Engineering and Geomatics, Cyprus University of Technology, Limassol, Cyprus

    Diofantos Hadjimitsis

  3. Department of Civil Engineering and Geomatics, Cyprus University of Technology, Limassol, Cyprus

    Dimitrios Skarlatos

  4. Department of Physical Geography and Ecosystem Science, Lund University GIS Center, Lund, Skåne Län, Sweden

    Ali Mansourian

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Ballatore, A., McClintock, W., Goldberg, G., Kuhn, W. (2020). Towards a Usability Scale for Participatory GIS. In: Kyriakidis, P., Hadjimitsis, D., Skarlatos, D., Mansourian, A. (eds) Geospatial Technologies for Local and Regional Development. AGILE 2019. Lecture Notes in Geoinformation and Cartography. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-14745-7_18

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