Combining Formal and Exploratory Methods for Evaluation of an Exploratory Geovisualization Application in a Low-Cost Usability Experiment

This paper presents a joined formal and exploratory usability evaluation of a geovisualization tool for emergency response data. The first objective of the evaluation, which is addressed by a formal usability test, is to evaluate the performance of the test participants on pre-defined exploration tasks. The second objective is to attempt to better understand how the participants explore the spatial dataset. This objective is addressed in the exploratory usability part of the experiment, where participants are given free hand to perform exploration in any way they want. The study introduces a low-cost methodology for performing usability evaluation, which uses simple and inexpensive methods for data collection and analysis, yet proves to be adequate to identify potentials and problems of the tool.

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