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Showing posts from December, 2021

Notes from the BTAA Geoportal's Interface Committee

By Daniel Dotson The BTAA Geoportal has several committees working towards making the Geoportal happen and improving it. This first blog is going to focus on examples of the Interface Committee 's recent work and how that has affected the Geoportal. User Testing We work with students (some familiar with geospatial information topics, some not) and walk them through a series of tasks to see how they respond. Do they find something hard to do? Do they misunderstand something they so or do? Do they not see a path to get the answer? Do they run into an error? We take the information we gather from these tests and then decide on what changes we need to make to the interface to improve it. A simple change was to add a 4th search box to the advanced search since there were only 4 search fields - a student pointed that out as something we could do! Sometimes the changes are more complicated. For example, changes to the map interface may take a bit longer to implement. Adding options for he