User-centered Design of Collaborative Geovisualization Tools

Publisher Summary This chapter focuses on approaches to facilitate user-centered design (UCD) between distributed users and developers of collaborative tools. Additionally, it introduces a case study that illustrates the way these approaches have been implemented to aid remote collaboration in the environmental sciences. It introduces an initial set of online user centered assessment techniques that can be expanded into a more formal methodology, which merges electronic usability assessment with traditional techniques. Most current UCD assessment methods are derived from recommendations made for single user workspaces. Although these methods provide a basis for creating new collaborative geovisualization tools, they do not fully support collaboration between groups of usability test subjects and software designers who are often distributed in space and usability measurements of geocollaborative tools running in a “real-world” distributed mode. Research on collaborative geovisualization tool design has just begun and offers many interesting research challenges.