Feedback on Wilderness Map

[LisaEidson]

The new wilderness map I'm testing and will eventually launch on my website http://www.wilderness.net could use a good critique. This map overlays official wilderness boundaries that I maintain on top of aerial photography and locational basemaps provided by Bing and a topographic basemap by ESRI. It also has a custom nav panel with various buttons and popups if you click within a wilderness boundary. I'd like some feedback on how this works, how intuitive it is, whether you can break it 🙂 Don't be afraid to be blunt!

I've tested it in IE9, FireFox 10, Chrome 16.0.912.77m, and Safari (windows) 5.1. Feedback regarding performance in IE7, 8 would be much appreciated, as many in our audience use those browsers.

Although it's not the most enticing incentive, I'd be glad to send anybody who offers a thorough critique a free Wilderness.net sticker; just email me, Lisa Eidson, your address and sticker preference (1 of 10 different ones with text on back) after you post your critique.

Here's the link to the map: http://www.wilderness.net/map.cfm

Thanks much to anyone willing to offer feedback!

[derekswingley1]

Link to the map?

[StephenLead]

There's a group at http://geoux.org who would also be able to provide valuable feedback on the design.

[derekswingley1]

There's a group at http://geoux.org who would also be able to provide valuable feedback on the design.

Is that group still active? I had high hopes after last year's dev summit where it was announced but haven't seen anything there in quite a while. Maybe Kirk will reboot it in Palm Springs this year...

[StephenLead]

If Lisa posts a link to her map, it'll be active 🙂

[LisaEidson]

Boy am I running on empty today!!! Here's the link to the map: http://www.wilderness.net/map.cfm

[StephenLead]

Hi Lisa,

Firstly, congratulations on your application - it looks great, and obviously represents a lot of work. I like it overall - here are some suggested changes.

- The Zoom In and Pan tools are redundant - the map itself can handle these natively, so you could remove them to simplify the UI. It can confuse novice users when the map behaves differently depending on which tool is active

- Presumably your site is aimed at non-expert users, so I would remove a lot of the Advanced functionality like "toggle off wilderness names, toggle off popups", etc. Decide what will work for most of the people, most of the time, and set that as the default.

- Could you combine Zoom to a Wilderness and Search, since they're basically both navigation aids? If you used type-ahead (like in a Google search) you could prompt the user as they started typing.

- Clicking outside of a wilderness shows a warning message. If you used Feature Layers, you could listen for mouseOver events and highlight the boundary, showing people that something will happen if they click on that feature.

- The XY coordinates in the lower left are a bit of a distraction - do your (non-expert) users really care? What about showing the coordinates in the popup on mouse-click?

- I'm pretty sure it's illegal (or at least frowned upon) to cover the Bing logo 🙂

Congrats again,
Steve

[derekswingley1]

Looking good! I especially like the toggling experience of the bar across the top of the map.

Here are things I would at least thing about changing:
-get rid of the three navigation controls
-update your help section to say you can hold shift + click and drag to zoom, say you click and drag to pan
-use a bigger icon to open your help section
-consider using a dijit filtering for your list of areas, this would let people type the first few letters of the location they want and get a filtered list, scrolling through 700+ options you currently have
-center the "OVERLAYS" text over the three overlay options
-the "toggle on/off" popup windows doesn't seem to do anything, I could be missing something...
-move your search box from the lower left to the upper right, maybe you could put this in the bar of controls across the top of the map
-round your lat, long coordinates, see:  http://gis.stackexchange.com/a/8674/124
-don't toggle the zoom slider when the map updates, it's distracting

[LisaEidson]

Steve, Derek,
Thanks so much for taking the time to offer some great suggestions. Several I've already been able to add with ease! I'm really interested in tackline the digit filtering idea next for better usability of the wilderness name dropdown. I'm not really familiar with dojo outside of the documentation provided on the arcgis resource site for the javascript api, so could you point me in the right direction?

[derekswingley1]

Good stuff.

Here's the dojo doc for FilteringSelects. And a page with test/demos.