IMPROVING USABILITY OF CARTOGRAPHIC INFORMATION SYSTEM THROUGH HUMANIS COGNITIVE RULES

Y. Lin, Y. Chen

Zhengzhou Institute of Surveying and Mapping, Zhengzhou, China

lycloudy@yahoo.com.cn

Cartographic information system (CIS) is an important tool to help people to enquire and use spatial information. It is wildly used in different fields and has a good developing future. Today cartographic information system is providing popular spatial information service. More and more users get spatial information they needed by different kind of cartographic information systems that running in PC, internet, and personal digital equipment such as PDA or smart phone.

The effect of users’ using CIS is determined by the information flow between users and the system. So, it is necessary for the designer of cartographic information system to study how to send the system’s information to users more effectively and give a more easy way to users to express their needs to the system. Because of human and computer system have different information processing mechanisms, when cartographic information system was used by human users, all the system information should be expressed to users through system’s GUI (Graphic User Interface). GUI transforms information between user and system.

In this paper, the authors study how to use human’s cognitive rules to guide the design and development of GUI in cartographic information system, and then enhance the usability of the system. The human cognitive rules concerned in this paper include human’s vision, hearing, momery, language, and learning ability. All these cognitive factors composed the characteristic of user’s information acceptance and expression. With these cognitive rules, the authors established some design principals to enhance the usability of cartographic information system. Finally, the authors introduced the design and implementation of a prototype system with the GUI accorded with human’s cognitive rules.