How do user-centered design studies contribute to cartography?

Abstract

I ask in this essay: How do user-centered design studies contribute to cartography? Scholars in related fields increasingly recognize the intellectual value of employing user-centered processes to improve a single product and identify new design considerations for future products. To this end, I propose an analytical framework for organizing the contributions of user-centered design studies that includes eight opportunities for advancing cartography: (1) domain gap analyses, (2) adapted or novel user-centered methods, (3) streamlined user-centered design processes, (4) transferable design insights, (5) comprehensive user-centered design case studies, (6) novel or unique maps and visualizations, (7) summative controlled experiments, and (8) new insights into pressing geographic problems. I apply this framework against my own collaborative work in a retrospective analysis of three UCD case studies: the GeoVISTA CrimeViz visual analytics tool, the NOAA Lake Level Viewer climate change visualization, and the UW Cart Lab Global Madison mobile map.