Comments on: The Map Bar Has to Go

By: Josh Pierro

Josh Pierro — Thu, 22 Apr 2010 14:31:38 +0000

Amen brother!

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Fri, 18 Dec 2009 21:36:33 +0000

Try Business Analyst Online from ESRI, it is easy to use and simple.

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Fri, 18 Dec 2009 20:04:09 +0000

Try Business Analyst Online from ESRI

By: SJ

SJ — Fri, 18 Dec 2009 20:01:26 +0000

How about using the web standard 1024 X 768 (effectively 1004 X 598) when designing these interfaces.

By: Brian

Brian — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 10:50:42 +0000

You raise good points under your rant, but I’m not sure whether you’ve personally tackled the problem of building general purpose powerful yet easy-to-use map viewers for general users (not geo/analyst type people), because you act like it’s trivial. It’s really not.

Google Maps is great for a lot of tasks, I use it all the time, but I wouldn’t call it especially powerful. You can’t even easily measure straight line distances out of the box. I realize that’s not necessary because its target audience is people that are getting addresses, looking for a place to eat, or figuring out how long it will take them to get to a shopping mall or their cousin’s house. Which of course is the point…

Now if you do have additional requirements (like many people do), say to do mensuration, overlays, animated overlays, bookmarks *in* the viewer, drawing, exporting drawings for powerpoint presentations with annotations, letting people add georss feeds.. and so on. I can’t show animated cloud cover or add caveats and classifications. I can’t do simple buffering, geoprocessing services.. etc.

Google Maps can’t do that. It basically displays 2 basemaps and lets you get directions. And it’s GREAT at that. But it also has tons of money backing it, a huge team, and it’s targetting a very specialized usage case..

So guess what? The rest of us end up with a lot more stuff and you have to put it somewhere. Now I’ll agree that most web map apps out there don’t have great UIs. Our enterprise one sucks, that’s why I’ve started rewriting to make it more “task-centric” rather than “tool-centric”.

It doesn’t mean we’re not aware of the problem; most of us live in the real world where we have a thousand other things to do and while I’d love to have a dedicated UX person and designer doing it fulltime – it’s not gonna happen.

By: Adam Conner

Adam Conner — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 15:48:03 +0000

Their new site is still in development. I will respond here once it is in production.

By: Drew

Drew — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 15:15:12 +0000

Job Security!

By: Henko

Henko — Sun, 15 Nov 2009 21:46:02 +0000

Stamen and Michal Migurski did a nice thing with Oakland Crimespotting (http://oakland.crimespotting.org) proving the point with the design/carto part.

I believe that UI will be more and more important. We can see this at a municipality level here in Sweden where I work – if the web map application isn’t as intuitive and fast as lets say googlemaps our information departments will use googlemaps instead. Old clunky ArcIMS webapps just wont do anymore.

By: Andrew Zolnai

Andrew Zolnai — Sun, 15 Nov 2009 17:57:42 +0000

Behind your rant, you raise a good point James – what is the mandate of the USGS?
1) to provide data like the seamless server (http://seamless.usgs.gov/)
2) to provide a front-end like
a) Earth Explorer (http://earthexplorer.usgs.gov/)
b) or EROS viewer (http://glovis.usgs.gov/)
c) or Oil&Gas Assessments (http://certmapper.cr.usgs.gov) etc.
3) and how about GOS (http://www.geodata.gov), National Atlas (http://nationalatlas.gov/), etc.?

Doesn’t it look like USGS tried to rationalise the plethora of sites using NGA’s Palanterra, and provide user community a chance for feedback on your National Map (meaning US taxpayers)? This discussion will NOT go away anytime soon, judging by the same in other countries! Thanks for asking those uncomfortable questions…

By: Mike Arceri

Mike Arceri — Sun, 15 Nov 2009 17:56:47 +0000

Theres my application, we have been working in GIS applications for Guatemala. If you could check it out and send us some feedback would be great.

http://www.guaterutas.com/