Publicly available map types and their utilization by non-experts – A choice experiment
ISBN 978-85-88783-11-9
Authors
1Coltekin, A.; 2Lokka, I.E.F.; 3Boer, A.
1DEPARTMENT OF GEOGRAPHY, UNIVERSITY OF ZURICH Email: arzu@geo.uzh.ch
2DEPARTMENT OF GEOGRAPHY, UNIVERSITY OF ZURICH Email: ismini-eleni.lokka@geo.uzh.ch
3DEPARTMENT OF GEOGRAPHY, UNIVERSITY OF ZURICH Email: boeraliz@gmail.com
Abstract
Trying to understand which map types are a good fit for which task types have been an active research area in user-centered cartographic thinking (e.g., Fairbairn et al., 2001). A first step towards this is perhaps to analyze what people do with maps, i.e., the current state of the art from a user-centered perspective. To contribute to these efforts, we have conducted an online user study (n= 141, 74% male, 26% female) in which participants were given five map types to chose from while they executed 11 non-expert map use tasks. The 11 tasks were designed to correspond with five of the task categories for non-expert map users developed by Carter (2005): self-location, route planning, identifying other locations, identifying places of interest, and virtual tourism. We divided virtual tourism to planning and in-situ sense of place based on an initial study where we observed that these two types of virtual tourism would affect the participant choices. In the experiment, participants were asked to execute a representative task and were told they could choose one of the five map types to work with. The provided map types were: 2D Cartographic Map, 2D Satellite Map, 2.5D Terrain Representation, (pseudo) 3D Street View, and 3D Virtual Globe. All map were Google products and were presented interactively. User could choose a tab and the maps loaded inside a frame. In this paper we report on our findings where we documented participant’s choices of map types associated with task types as they executed the experiment’s tasks. We also analyze the map types in a categorized manner for 2D vs. 3D, cartographic vs. photo-realistic, and aerial perspective vs. first-person perspective and contrast each with the task types. This is a follow-up study from a previous online experiment where the participants were asked (without executing a task), which map type they thought they would use (Boer et al., 2013). The results from this study were also compared to a subset of the results from Boer et al. (2013). References: 1) Boer, A., Coltekin, A., & Clarke, K. C. (2013). Evaluating Web-based Geovisualizations Online: A Case Study with Abstraction-Realism Spectrum in Focus. In International Cartographic Conference, ICC 2013, Dresden, Germany. 2) Carter, J. R. (2005). The Many Dimensions of Map Use. In Proceedings International Cartographic Conference (p. 9). Coruna, Spain. 3) Fairbairn, D., Andrienko, G., Andrienko, N., Buziek, G., & Dykes, J. (2001). Representation and its relationship with cartographic visualization: a research agenda. Cartography and Geographic Information Science, 28(1).
Keywords
user study; map use; geographic task types