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Towards a usability scale for participatory GIS

Ballatore, Andrea and McClintock, W. and Goldberg, G. and Kuhn, W. (2019) Towards a usability scale for participatory GIS. In: Kyriakidis, P. and Hadjimitsis, D. and Skarlatos, D. and Mansourian, A. (eds.) AGILE 2019: Geospatial Technologies for Local and Regional Development. Lecture Notes in Geoinformation and Cartography. Springer, pp. 327-348. ISBN 9783030147440.

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Abstract

Since its emergence in the 1990s, the area of Participatory GIS (PGIS) has generated numerous interactive mapping tools to support complex planning processes. The need to involve non-expert users makes the usability of these tools a crucial aspect that contributes to their success or failure. While many approaches and procedures have been proposed to assess usability in general, to date there is no standardized way to measure the overall usability of a PGIS. For this purpose, we introduce the Participatory GIS Usability Scale (PGUS), a questionnaire to evaluate the usability of a PGIS along five dimensions (user interface, spatial interface, learnability, effectiveness, and communication). The questionnaire was developed in collaboration with the user community of SeaSketch, a web-based platform for marine spatial planning. PGUS quantifies the subjective perception of usability on a scale between 0 and 100, facilitating the rapid evaluation and comparison between PGIS. As a case study, the PGUS was used to collect feedback from 175 SeaSketch users, highlighting the usability strengths and weaknesses of the platform.

Metadata

Item Type: Book Section
Additional Information: Series ISSN: 1863-2246
Keyword(s) / Subject(s): Participatory GIS, PGIS, Participatory GIS Usability Scale (PGUS), usability evaluation, user experience, web mapping
School: Birkbeck Faculties and Schools > Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences > School of Social Sciences
Research Centres and Institutes: Data Analytics, Birkbeck Institute for
Depositing User: Andrea Ballatore
Date Deposited: 05 Feb 2019 10:13
Last Modified: 19 Jul 2025 09:51
URI: https://eprints.bbk.ac.uk/id/eprint/26093

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