An interesting topic of discussion at the GIS in the Rockies event was that of usability. This topic was brought up by Peter Batty in his Ignite Spatial NOCO presentation the night before the event kicked off, and appropriately, Batty discussed usability during his keynote - very appropriate in my opinion.
GIS and Geo technology in general has suffered from usability issues greatly over the years and still this is a huge topic and area of concern. Indeed, GIS pros are very good at making things (apps, websites, services, very complex, often complex to the point that users are scared off of they merely adopt only a small percent of the total functionality - once again we can look at the example of MS Office and how 90% of users likely only use up to 10% of the functionality - enter a huge usability issue! No doubt you can thing about ArcGIS, ArcView, Manifold, MapInfo, or whatever platform you desire... I guarantee that if you really look hard, many of you are lucky of you've ever come close to utilizing even 30% of the functionality available to you.
In an effort to prove his point, Batty went through a short demo where he was attempting to use a GIS database in order to obtain the attribute value of interest to his scenario. He walk through a series of steps, eventually getting the information he wanted, this taking him 10 clicks of the mouse! Batty then contrasted this with a short demo using Ubisense myWorld (Batty is a founder of Ubisense) and got to the same information simply with one click of the mouse. Perhaps the scenario was a little exagerated, however, it really wasn't that hard to believe and there's no doubt you've experienced a similar issue using a GIS application or web service.
After some discussion, Batty offered up an interesting tidbit of Rules for usability:
Do usability testing!
Put the application in front of users, shut-up, watch them!
Give a short list of user scenarios and examples to watch
In an interesting, real-life example, Batty contrasted a current scenario of wildfire webmaps, one being a simple, yet effective Tweet map showing real-time [almost] tweets of interest the other being an IMS site of wildfire information that was much more cluttered with icons and options, and as a result, much less intuitive to the user - in common, traditional GIS fashion, the application was far more complex than it really needed to be - this the result of packaging loads of functionality, although most users would only be interested in one or 2 options.
Seems to me that the KISS rule (Keep It Simple Stupid!) has been forgotten over the years by the GIS industry! Perhaps one of the most common examples of this today might be the adoption and the reluctance of adoption of OpenStreetMap (OSM), a fabulous, crowd-sourced solution to build accurate, useful basemaps for use as a starting point in GIS apps and services. While OSM has clearly simplified the data collection process by reducing much beurocratic red tape, expensive data collection methods, and eliminate storing the data in a closed, proprietary format.
Interesting to note, in a panel session at GIS in the Rockies concerning government data and data sharing I picked up on a few interesting tidbits that were mentioned. I found it interesting (or should I say disturbing) that the mindset of the speakers (from Government agencies) concerning several very common resources being used by GIS professionals around the World were fearful, closed-minded, and taking me back to the 1980s! Some of the interesting tidbits picked up on include:
mention that the National Map project could go away
a mindset about crowd-sourcing where it's thought that when everyone is responsible nobody is responsible
and perhaps the most troubling, a Federal agency data steward felt that crowd sourcing presents a vulnerability to us and that OSM will NEVER be the authoratative source
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