User-Centered Design as a Method for Engaging Users in the Development of Geovisualization: A Use Case of Temperature Visualization

Abstract

Visualization of geographic data is part of many widely used solutions that aim to communicate the information to the end user. Effective visualizations are those that are tailored to a specific group of users and their tasks, as well as to specific properties of the data. Usability is a key concept for such solutions, and the most effective way to achieve high usability is to incorporate user-centered design (UCD) into the development process. In visualization, data are often coded by colors, so the choice of color schemes and color range is critical to enable the reverse mapping of colors to data. In this paper, we present a method for integrating the principles of UCD into the development process. In doing so, we use a case involving the selection of the most appropriate color scheme and associated parameters for representing temperature values on geographic maps. The method described is suitable for use in UCD-based research related to the visualization of various types of data and is useful for researchers and developers of geovisualizations.

Keywords

• user-centered design
• usability
• user testing
• visualization
• GIS
• geographic data