Geografie 2019, 124, 133-161
How do user-centered design studies contribute to cartography?
University of Wisconsin, Department of Geography, Madison, USA
Received November 2018
Accepted May 2019
I ask in this essay: How do user-centered design studies contribute to cartography? Scholars in related fields increasingly recognize the intellectual value of employing user-centered processes to improve a single product and identify new design considerations for future products. To this end, I propose an analytical framework for organizing the contributions of user-centered design studies that includes eight opportunities for advancing cartography: (1) domain gap analyses, (2) adapted or novel user-centered methods, (3) streamlined user-centered design processes, (4) transferable design insights, (5) comprehensive user-centered design case studies, (6) novel or unique maps and visualizations, (7) summative controlled experiments, and (8) new insights into pressing geographic problems. I apply this framework against my own collaborative work in a retrospective analysis of three UCD case studies: the GeoVISTA CrimeViz visual analytics tool, the NOAA Lake Level Viewer climate change visualization, and the UW Cart Lab Global Madison mobile map.
Keywords
cartography, visualization, user-centered design, design studies, methodology, usability.
Funding
Portions of this research were funded by VACCINE Award #2009-ST-061-CI0001, NOAA Award #167152, and NSF CAREER Award #1555267.
