An Approach to Decompose and Evaluate a Complex GIS-Application Design to a Simple, Lightweight, User-Centered App-Based Design Using User Experience Evaluation

Working with contemporary, monolithic desktop Geographical Information Systems can be laborious and confusing, especially for non-experts. An alternative for a more user friendly approach to spatial data edition and spatial analysis may be an “app-based” web application that is offering single tasks for the user—“micro applications”. In this paper, a method for determining such “micro applications” based on user stories is presented and applied to a specific use case—the case is centered around an Austrian Governmental Institution that digitizes and edits infrastructure data. The results of this process are implemented in an app-based web application. To measure the impacts of the app-based approach, we evaluate the user experience of the app-based approach in comparison to a desktop Geographical Information System offering the same functionality. For the measurement of the user experience, we used a focus group. The group had to accomplish tasks with the desktop Geographical Information System and with the app-based web application. To measure their user experience, we employed the tool AttrakDiff. The app-based web application achieves significantly better results in terms of user experience. This result is confirmed in a discussion panel carried out afterwards. Test persons responded that positive aspects of the app-based web application were the easy and intuitive handling and reduced user interface that helps the users to focus on their tasks without any distraction.