Understanding and Improving the Utilization of Web and Mobile GIS Solutions for Outdoor Environment Management
Abstract: Trees, plants, water,playgrounds, green areas and benches are just a few out of many components thatforms a pleasant outdoor environment. Not only are management and maintenancenecessary to keep the environment clean and nice for everybodys well-being, butalso documentation and records of geographic data representing the outdoorenvironment. Management and maintenance requires plans and cost calculationwhere the geographic data is used as a basis. The data needs to therefor bereliably and continuously controlled and updated, especially due to thecomponents of an outdoor environment constant change and move. An effective wayto store, visualize and manage data related to geographic locations is to useGeographic Information System (GIS) solutions.This thesis is applying a user-centered design approach to derive a prototypethat encourages use of web and mobile GIS solutions in the field duringcontrols and maintenance and thereby resulting in more efficient data updateprocedures and maintenance operations. A case study is performed involving thetwo housing companies Svenska Bostäder and Stockholmshem where management andmaintenance of geographic data representing the outdoor housing environment isinvolved in their work and is today managed by primitive methods. Theuser-centered design approach Focus Rapid Contextual Design is applied toderive user requirements in terms of functionality and user interface forfurther use to develop and integrate a prototype within the housing companiesexisting GIS solutions. The overall objective is to investigate, document andevaluate how an user-centered design approach can be applied to introduce webGIS solutions that will improve the workflow between office and field, this byreducing the number of steps performed during a field control by replacingprimitive tools such as paper and PDF maps used today with the suggested GISsolutions. The potential long term impact of this study is to encourage thelayman users that are working in field to use these new solutions instead ofprimitive methods, this by adapting functionalities and user interface in theweb and mobile GIS solutions according to the layman users needs and levels byapplying the user-centered design approach.The Focus Rapid Contextual Design method shows to be successful in terms ofgathering and managing user data in a structured way. Due to tight timeschedule and project resource limitations, an iterative prototype process whereuser feedback is used to redesign the prototype for further improvement was notperformed. Only one prototype evaluation was performed and did not take placein context of use. This lead to weak user feedback meaning that the prototypemost likely could have been further adapted to the users needs if an iterativeprocess that took place in context of use was performed. It would most likelyfacilitate the faster adaptation for the web GIS solutions in the housingcompanies daily work. Encouraging layman users to change from manual to digitalsystems is seen as one if the major challenges during this thesis. Even thougha user centered design approach contributes to reach the potential long termimpact of this study which is to encourage layman user to use the suggestedsolutions, most likely organizational changes and policies are needed toaccomplish process changes and make field workers change their working manners.A small case study like the one performed in this thesis could possibly havebeen performed excluding the Working Models and Storyboarding in the Focus RapidContextual Design method without affecting the final result, this to gain moretime for the iterative prototype process as well as time for involving moreusers. Doing so could improve the work in this study to better reach the statedgoals.
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