Our first meeting with Jake Cook in Seattle was a clear milestone for mGIS project indeed. Jake brought to light couple of things on which we didn't pay attention before.
1. Tablet-pen seems more preferable rather than mouse. Although we could not use the tablet in a tablet mood. Jake compared the pen as the cane of a blind person.
2. Alerting user when the mouse is going outside the map panel (ex. at the edge of the screen, on the menu barn etc.) was an issue. Using Jaws may help us.
3. Even the basic map of Yellowstone park seemed much more complicated for Jake. It can be of several reasons:
a. Jake didn't have an overall idea of the map.
b. The map has couple of buffered rivers (13 rivers) with a number of bends. He felt better when we zoomed in and he found only one or two wide rivers on screen. We need to think about the simplification of the rivers. Increasing the amount of buffer can help us partially.
c. We didn't set up a task-list for Jake. May be Amy could help us doing so. Jake was wandering what he needed to do. He was trying to understand the direction of a river or which way it flows. For one river he found the correct direction.
4. We also tested the multi-touch tablet. Although this one was not big enough for the screen it worked well for Jake. He was using his right hand index finger.
While Jake preferred the pen to the mouse-like puck, he preferred finger tracking (on the Bamboo tablet) to both, and to me it looked like he was able to make finer, more controlled movements with his finger-tips. It's unfortunate that finger-tracking tablets available now are smaller and have lower resolution than pen tablets, but the trade-off may be worthwhile. We're ordering additional finger-tracking tablets to follow up on this.
ReplyDeleteThe problem with borders of the map may be addressed by configuring the tablet to map all the coordinates of the tablet to the window. It's unfortunate that I didn't realize in advance that we needed to configure the tablet driver for this on the test laptop. Configuring it in this way should also scale the surface to fit the display area.
Re observation #3, we definitely need to simplify the map, and in addition we need to think about ways of providing a summary overview of the map, the area "around" the current location, or both.