A Comparison Of Two Direct-Manipulation Gis User Interfaces For Map Overlay

We have designed two different direct-manipulation user interfaces for Geographic Information Systems that are based on the map-overlay metaphor. In both interfaces, users explore geographic information by moving themes of spatial data onto a viewing platform, on which they can examine them in an integrated fashion. The first user interface separates the content of a theme and its graphical presentation into two different parts, referred to as the data cube and the template. Both parts are manipulated independently enabling users to view the same data in different ways by replacing one template with another. The second user interface combines the content of a theme and its presentation into a single representation, called a layer. For both user interfaces, iconic languages are introduced that resemble the manipulations on the Macintosh desktop. To compare the two visualizations of the user interfaces, we developed a quantitative model which measures the conceptual and operational complexities of a direct-manipulation user interface. This new method is based on the cognitive walkthrough analysis and considers (1) the number of concepts a user has to learn before performing a particular operation in the user interface; (2) the number of individual actions the user has to perform when executing a particular operation; and (3) the number of errors a user might run into when executing an operation. Applied to a set of most common tasks undertaken when manipulating geographic themes, the comparison reveals that the layer interface is less complex than the cube-andtemplate interface in all three categories.

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