Usability in the GeoWeb. Or: Am I afraid of web designers eating my lunch?

Dave Bouwman gave a nice presentation on “Usability in the GeoWeb” at the Texas GIS Forum. I found it very good and each of the 140 pages worth to look at. It has some really enlightening remarks on today’s usability issues with WebGIS sites. In fact most of today’s WebGIS applications are way too complex, intimidating and not focused on the applications real purpose. A plethora of incomprehensible toolbar items, table of content widgets, generic search formulars will overstrain users and slow down the whole interface.

I strongly agree with Dave Bouwman’s assumption that this is the result of a long lasting strategy of trying to cram desktop GIS into the browser with GIS manufacturers concentrating on developing utterly generic “out-of-the-box” WebGIS products. So this wants us GIS developers make to believe that we are able to produce WebGIS applications in a jif. But the simple fact is that 99% of so called WebGIS apps have a quite narrow purpose, thus need pretty focused functions and user interfaces instead of bloated generic UI’s.

Am I afraid of web designers eating my lunch?

… Nope, quite the contrary! Good web sites need a lot of knowlegde in usabilty design. And since web designers usually offer this kind of knowledge, I would appreciate a much closer collaboration with them. Web design actually is not my bread and butter. I would rather like to concentrate much more on things like backend GIS functions, geocoders, tile servers etc. In other words, as a GIS developer I’ll gladly share my lunch with web designers where this task-sharing increases my margin for more potentially feasible projects. Finally, I think this way everyone will get more lunch by letting everyone do what they do best.