Usability Analysis of Geographic Information System

A Geographical Information System (GIS) is a computer system capableof creating, capturing and storing, analyzing, managing, and displayinggeographically referenced information. A GIS tool offers interactive userinterfaces to submit queries, analyze and edit data. The usability criterion of aGIS tool is an important factor for analyzing geographical information. This paperpresents a methodology for evaluating the usability of a GIS tool and proposessome guidelines to find out the severity ratings of problems in a GIS tool. Thepaper also demonstrates how to scrutinize the usability to discover potentialproblems using a prototype user interface. Based on the study, experience, andobservation, this paper also proposes a number of general usability evaluationguidelines for GIS tools.