BTAA-GIN Collection Stories

  Image Source: US Department of Defense We just finished our 3 rd  Interface Sprint, where we do different challenges to see if we can test recent changes to the interface, find problems, or even to see if we can "break" something. This doesn't always result in interface issues. For example, at our most recent sprint, we put forward the challenge of finding maps of countries in their native language. This was used to test the new language facet. But it's revealed that we don't seem to have maps of several countries in their native language. China in Chinese being very prominently absent.  The Geoportal does have over 1700 Russia maps in Russian. One issue found during this sprint has already been fixed! We had a task to explore the site for potential accessibility concerns. An automated checker found some of the colors used to have concerns with contrast. So the color scheme was updated to give better contrast!  So what do we do with ...

By Danny Dotson Source:   EPA One of the features the Interface Committee has heard that would be useful for the Geoportal to have is the ability to either search for or filter by language.  So fine, let's make that happen. But, this is going to cause work in other areas to make language searching/filtering actually work well. Why is this the case?   Metadata: Does Each Item Have a Language listed? Short answer: no. So this means for language to be a valuable search/filter option, items need to have a language included in their metadata. Many currently don't.  Most of these are very likely in English as they are geospatial data sources from various government entities in the US.  But until we make sure and the change is made, the language for these items is essentially non-existent.  So the people working with metadata would need to examine the language-less items to add the appropriate language to the item's metadata. This can be time...

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...