Myke Gluck

Focus Groups for Design Improvement in Dynamic Cartography

Four focus group interviews provided an evaluation of the concepts of the graphic narrative and the stage-and-play metaphor for dynamic cartography. The 26 information, cartographic, and computer specialists who participated in the interviews provided a range of opinions on graphic scripts and the dynamic integration of maps and statistical graphs. Respondents in each session first viewed a graphic script designed to explore the correlation between two spatial distributions and then discussed the scripts informativeness, coherence, merit, and deficiencies. Respondents next viewed and discussed a two-part demonstration of portions of a time-series script and of user-control enhancements for the correlation script. Participants found the graphic narrative engaging and informative, were able to discern patterns in the data without identifying false patterns, and contributed a variety of suggestions and criticisms useful in refining both the prototype scripts and the theory of narrative graphics. As a design...

Exploring the relationship between user satisfaction and relevance in information systems

The goal of this research was to better understand the relationship between relevance and user-satisfaction, the two predominant aspects of user-based performance in information systems. This project unconfounds relevance and user-satisfaction assessments of system performance at the retrieved item level. To minimize the idiosyncracies of any one system, a generalized, naturalistic information system was employed in this study. Respondents completed sense-making timeline questionnaires in which they described a recent need they had for geographic information. Retrieved documents from the generalized system consisted of the responses users obtained while resolving their information needs. Respondents directly provided process, product, cost-benefit, and overall satisfaction assessments with the generalized geographic system. Relevance judgments of retrieved items were obtained through content analysis from sense-making questionnaires as a secondary observation technique. The content analysis provided relevance values on both five-category and two-category scales. Results indicate that relevance has strong relationships (gamma values from 0.74 to 0.89) with process, product and overall user satisfaction measures while relevance and cost-benefit satisfaction measures have no significant relationship (gamma value of 0.049). This analysis also indicates that neither relevance nor user-satisfaction subsumes the other concept, and that understanding the proper units of analysis for these measures helps resolve the paradox of the management information system and information science literatures not informing each other concerning user-based information system performance measures.

Understanding performance in information systems: blending relevance and competence

Information systems have many stakeholder groups with differing views and assessment methods of user performance. For example, users find software unfriendly, and system maintainers find users recalcitrant. Performance of information systems usually measures either the competence of the user as seen from the systems perspective or the relevance of the retrieved materials as seen from the users perspective. This article presents brief accounts of the user-based performance measure of relevance and the information system-based performance measure of competence. Relevance and competence are shown to be complex notions that have not been studied conjointly. The article then reports the results of an experiment that used a generalized geographic information system to illustrate how collecting and analyzing data simultaneously from both a system and user views of performance can suggest improvements for information systems. The users view of this generalized system was formed by respondents describing a recent geographic information need situation and its resolution. The system view of the user in this generalized geographic information system was described by the accuracy and time on tasks of subjects as they read and answered questions concerning geographic text and map documents. This exploratory research generated two major hypotheses: Relevance varies directly with levels of competence and experience, and relevance varies directly with the difficulty of the task. These relationships are interesting and need further investigation because their underlying cause is not easily determined. The findings also indicate that through a merged, no-fault model, information science can contribute to constructing a holistic view of system performance by illustrating relationships among factors such as competence and relevance, and by exposing new factors such as expectations.

Geographic Information Retrieval and the World Wide Web: A Match Made in Electronic Space

This article looks at the access to geographic information through a review of information science theory and its application to the WWW. The two most common retrieval systems are information and data retrieval. A retrieval system has seven elements: retrieval models, indexing, match and retrieval, relevance, order, query languages and query specification. The goal of information retrieval is to match the users needs to the information that is in the system. Retrieval of geographic information is a combination of both information and data retrieval. Aids to effective retrieval of geographic information are: query languages that employ icons and natural language, automatic indexing of geographic information, and standardization of geographic information. One area that has seen an explosion of geographic information retrieval systems (GIRs) is the World Wide Web (WWW). The final section of this article discusses how seven WWW GIRs solve the the problem of matching the users information needs to the information in the system.