Improving the Usability of Spatial Information Products and Services

With the rapid growth in the range of spatial information products and services now being offered to consumers, there is increasing competition occurring in the marketplace. The implication of this competition is that data producers and service providers need to be far more certain that what they create will satisfy customer needs. At the same time it should also yield a positive return on their investment in terms of the time and money spent in research and development, and bringing the product to the marketplace. Traditionally, there has been a tendency within the spatial information industry to think that an information product’s usefulness is determined solely by its quality or ’fitness for use’. However, long-standing experience gained from the testing of software and hardware tells us that a more useful concept to apply in judging whether a product will satisfy consumer needs is the concept of ’usability’. This paper discusses some of the factors that might impact on spatial information usability, and illustrates them with a case study of an information product that has almost one million downloads per year, yet still generates many complaints from its consumers.