An approach for harvesting, visualizing, and analyzing WebGIS sessions to identify usability issues

Web-based Geographic Information Systems (WebGIS) are increasingly popular throughout various industries and also for providing the general public with access to spatio-temporal information. Novice or untrained users, however, frequently struggle when confronted with their typically complex map-based user interfaces. In this paper, we propose a holistic approach that facilitates the interactive analysis of aggregated user interactions with a WebGIS to identify specific issues of the user interfaces. It incorporates multiple visualization types (UI heatmaps and Sankey clickstream diagrams) that enable usability experts to analyze user behaviour and usability issues. We implemented a toolkit that realizes our approach. This was then evaluated in a real-world deployment (152 users over 14 days, 4 usability experts), where it enabled experts to identify issues with the implemented workflows and usability potential. Our main contribution is thus twofold: an approach to support usability analysis of complex WebGIS and a toolkit implementing the proposed approach. Results from the real-world deployment provide initial evidence that it supports usability experts in identifying usability issues.