A Study of the user friendliness of temporal legends in animated maps

Abstract

Among other topics related to the visual aspect of cartographic products, current research addresses the problem of user friendliness. The most significant research concerns those products that evolve most rapidly, a typical example being interactive dynamic maps. This group of cartographic works includes products that are relatively challenging for users with respect to their temporally fluid content and the possibility of interactive manipulation. The article begins with a basic discussion of user-friendliness in cartographic products; in this context it addresses the historical development of the notion of cartography as a science, as well as the evolution of the ways in which it has been defined and of its subjects of interest. It demonstrates that, aside from notions of cartography as a technical discipline, it is also of interest from a linguistic point of view for its role as a mean of communication between cartographer and map user. Still greater emphasis is placed on the design aspects of cartographic production. The study offers the example of recent developments in Czech cartographic production, in which the last twenty years have seen a significant differentiation between published cartographic products and amateur cartography generally. This applies to creation as well as user base. Next the article describes a study on the user-friendliness of temporal legends, which are very common in animated maps. The goal of this study, which was conducted during the summer of 2010, was not only to evaluate the given temporal legends, but also to investigate the extent to which users were able to work with temporal variables (with time) in a cartographic product. Among the tools for collecting data was a form of online test. This test posed questions to respondents and automatically measured the amount of time it took them to find their answers.