Guidelines for trust interface design for public engagement Web GIS

Abstract

Attesting to the powerful capabilities and in technology trends, many scholars envisioned the consolidation of geographic information systems (GIS) into vital tools for disseminating spatial information. GIS are presently used to inform, advise and instruct users in several contexts and to further engage citizens in decision-making processes that can impact and sustain policy development. Interaction with these applications incorporates risk and uncertainty, which have been repeatedly identified as preconditions in nurturing trust perceptions and which instigate a user's decision to rely on a system and act on the provided information. Research studies consistently demonstrated that a trust-oriented interface design can facilitate the development of more trustworthy, mainly e-commerce, systems. Trust in the Web GIS context, despite its significance, has only relatively recently received some attention. A set of human-computer interaction (HCI) user-based studies revealed some Web GIS trustee attributes that influence nonexperts' trust beliefs and found that when these are problematic or absent from interface design, users form irrational trust perceptions, which amplifies the risk and may impose dangers to the user. These Web GIS trustee attributes that influence non-experts' trust perceptions are formulated here into a set of trust guidelines. These are then evaluated using the PE-Nuclear tool, a Web GIS application, to inform the public about the site selection of a nuclear waste repository in the United Kingdom. Our preliminary results indicate that the proposed trust guidelines not only support the development of rational trust perceptions that protect non-experts from inappropriate use of Web GIS technology but also contribute towards improving interaction with such applications of public interest issue.

The Application of WebGIS Tools for Visualizing Coastal Flooding Vulnerability and Planning for Resiliency: The New Jersey Experience

“…In addition, we have provided information explaining the GIS data displayed, the sources and accuracy directly adjacent to the map viewer. Skarlatidou et al [38] suggest that these and other elements of the application's user interface are important to establishing end-user trust in WebGIS. As part of the larger project website, we included a background on the issues of sea level rise and coastal inundation, as well as links to resources to assist in interpreting and applying the information for land use planning purposes.…”

HCI-Evaluation of the GeoCitizen-reporting App for citizen participation in spatial planning and community management among members of marginalized communities in Cali, Colombia

“…Nowadays, geoweb technologies aim at reaching out to the general public by providing basic applications for simple tasks, instead of combining complex functionalities in expert GIS desktop systems (Haklay & Chao Li, 2010;Mittlböck et al, 2012;Skarlatidou et al, 2013). Hence, it is especially important to take into consideration the user context when designing and evaluating these applications.…”

Maps in Citizen Science: A Preliminary Analysis of Use and User Issues

“…OpenStreetMap (OSM) is perhaps one of the earliest examples that the literature cites to demonstrate how harnessing the power of the crowds for the collection of geographic information can result in the creation of a free, open source of map of the world (Goodchild, 2007;Haklay et al, 2008;Batty et al, 2010).We argue in this paper that the above developments from the geospatial context have massively contributed to the current state of citizen science. While interactive web maps made their appearance as mainly "way-finding" tools (Skarlatidou and Haklay, 2006), they quickly became part of digital interactions in a much broader context and they are currently a basic component of most citizen science projects. The relevance and significance of space has been fully exploited by technological features such as geotagging, GPS-enabled mobile devices fully integrated with other sensors, which has made the collection and sharing of data much easier (Haklay, 2013).…”

“…While these arguments refer to the broader field of citizen science, it is well known in the geospatial community from our experiences in other contexts (e.g. participatory GIS in policy-making), that non-expert interaction with mapping interfaces increases complexity (Skarlatidou et al, 2013). Batty et al (2010) further mention that such applications are developed based on methods which are "intuitive, expressive, personal, absurd, artistic or maybe just simply idiosyncratic applications of 'real' geographic techniques" and they do not necessarily "conform to the protocols of professional practice" (p1) which further creates interaction barriers and concerns for the end user.…”

“…The heuristic evaluation was based on the guidelines which have been recently proposed by Skarlatidou et al (in press) and which were developed based on an extensive systematic literature review and user testing to identify and provide a framework of user needs and requirements in citizen science. To effectively capture the spatial component we included a set of guidelines which were proposed for improving usability and trust in non-experts interactions with webmapping for decision-making purposes (Skarlatidou et al, 2013). To improve subjectivity and eliminate any potential bias, all three authors carried out the heuristic evaluation on all seven applications.…”