Testing the Usability of OpenStreetMap's iD Tool

ISBN 978-85-88783-11-9

Authors

¹Behrens, J.; ²Van Elzakker, C.; ³Schmidt, M.

¹VIENNA UNIVERSITY OF TECHNOLOGY Email: jb3@tzi.de
²UNIVERSITY OF TWENTE Email: c.vanelzakker@utwente.nl
³VIENNA UNIVERSITY OF TECHNOLOGY Email: manuela@cartography.tuwien.ac.at

Abstract

Abstract. The objective of this study is to investigate the usability of the iD editor of OpenStreetMap (OSM). To this end a usability test with 18 participants has been conducted. The participants were given mapping tasks to complete using iD and observed with the thinking aloud method as well as screen recording and mouse/keyboard logging. Additionally, the test persons were interviewed after each test. The data gathered were analysed with regard to key usability criteria such as learnability, efficiency, error tolerance, and subjective user satisfaction. The outcome of this study is the identification of usability issues from which possible improvements of the tool have been derived. The study shows that iD is an overall usable tool for novice users, but still shows opportunities for improvement especially in terms of learnability and error handling.