Usability Update
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post.
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First of all i need to say this yet again: users don’t read anything. Nothing. After adding the text “Enter Feedback….” into the feedback form we are still recieving what we can only assume are search terms like “MCG” a building code for McGill Hall.
Christmas in Wonderland ipod Fast Lane dvd On a happier note these are the analytics for the past couple of days. Seems like a lot of folks are getting to it.
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Usability.
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Today is the first day of school, and it is the first time the general population on campus has seen the new map. I’ve included a screenshot, if you click on it you will get the Big version which is Actual Size or you could just go to the map
Our Analytics when something like this (Thursday: 42 -> Sunday -> 900; Monday: 964 and still counting):
If you look at the map there are Two text input boxes, one at the top and one at the bottom. The top on is the search, and the bottom is the feedback input form. We’ve had a lot of good feedback, but there were some interesting entries:
- college of technology
- social science
- ED 315
- ss
- clapp
These are all places on campus, which lead us to believe that folks were getting confused about what that feedback box was for. It is Clearly labeled: ” What do you think of this page?” It seems this re-iterates that users don’t read anything
. To Help with this problem I decided to add in a default value of “Enter Feedback….” into the textbox that disappears when a person clicks it, hopefully that will help clarify.
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We’ve been constantly working on the map, fixing issues and concerns brought to light via the feedback, and also improving the current functionality. A couple of things that were commonly left in the feedback were
The scroll wheel controlling the zoom of the map is confusing. - so we “fixed” it, now the scroll wheel doesn’t affect the map.
daybreakers 2010 The Building Codes for the Buildings, for example Social Science is SS, are missed so we are going to do some conditioning on the zoom level to indicate whether or not to print the building codes.
We have also been getting lots of great information about the data that displays about each building. People have been good about letting us know when our data isn’t accurate and pointing us in the right direction to get it fixed.
Mapping without boundaries
In IT we have been working to create a mapping application for The University of Montana. We started with very few requirements.
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Make it better than the black and white PDF that is the current map.
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You can’t buy any software to make the map.
- And you’ve got some AutoCad files and some imagery from 2006
My partner in crime, Jamie, had read an article (http://www.alistapart.com/articles/takecontrolofyourmaps/) about creating interactive maps on the web. And having just graduated with a degree in Geographical Information Systems he was intrigued. We started working on an old development server we had and installed Ubuntu Server on it and started hacking away attempting to get all of the pieces in place. It took a lot of tinkering with different products, and arguing over the best way to implement and set up this application, but finally after trying out several different rendering engines, trying it with and without caching the tiles and tweeking the JavaScript we had something we could show to the people signing our paychecks. Since then it seems it’s been non stop development and feature implementations and UI meetings and reworks and polishes and on and on. The limitations of this tool seem to be non-existent.
This kind of application has so many uses for Higher Ed institution or even for a non-profit. It gives you so much flexibility, by allowing you to give your users spatial representations. Small scale representations of campuses or large scale representations of states or countries. Show your users exactly What you want to, and How you want to. Choose your own features show overlays to depict coverage areas in relation to different points or routes. The map we produced was taken from Auto-Cad data and pulled into arcGIS and stretched over ortho-photography. In our case we (and by we I mean Jamie) had to create and clean up the shape files that were needed to produce the map. We did a little test and were able to take files from the states web site and create a new map file, so we were running multiple maps going at once. Of course the unstyled map wasn’t much to look at it but it proves that it can be done, and with a little work those maps could be brought to life.
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Some of the possibilities we’ve thought of:
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A news and events feed that ties in building location information
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An accessibility map that could be easily updated and accessed both in text and the graphical interface
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Arboretum data showing the vegetation on campus
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Class Schedules for students, by pulling their classes from Banner
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Expanded virtual tour functionality, more panoramas, more photos and videos integrated
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Multiple maps each with a custom set of themes, some could be secured and accessed only by authorized users
- More robust data about each location, expanded details section
- And many, many more.
One last note. All of the photos we’ve used on the map we’ve found on flickr and gotten permission from their owners. So this is truly a community effort
Server Administration
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- Mapnik – the geographical rendering engine.
- Tilecache – caches the tiles for speedier performance
- PostgreSql – the database
- PostGIS – the database plugin that supports spatial data
- phppgadmin – used to help administer the database
We are both getting a lot better at Linux server administration, setting up security groups and samba shares and getting the static IP addresses set up is getting easier. Our development environment was a Ubuntu 8.04 32bit machine that is just about 6 years old, needless to say we were in need of something new. Our new box is a Virtual Machine (Host is Windows Server 2008, running Hyper-V, but more on virtualization later) and it’s running Ubuntu 8.10 64bit on a machine that has four processors and 4Gb of ram, it’s quite the improvement. We are going to be soft launching the map this week to select number of folks, and then we will fixing bugs, gathering feedback and looking forward to our official beta launch in early February.
We also just went though the process of rebuilding our subversion/bugzilla/development server which also runs on Ubuntu Server, As of this point we have configured four Linux servers (all Ubuntu Server). Not bad for a shop where Open Source was a bad word and server was synonymous with Windows.
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Development
There are a lot of ways to develop software, there are development life cycles that are studied in classes, and written and rewritten in books. Usually they go something like this (I took this from the Wikipedia page: Systems_Development_Life_Cycle):
Initiation/Planning -> Requirements Gatherings And Analysis -> Design -> Build or Coding -> Testing -> Operations and Maintenance -> then back to Initiation/Planning.
I, and I think a lot of developers out there, would much rather skip to the coding than spend hours and hours planning and writing pseudo code and gathering requirement and so on. And that is how this project has come to be. We were given some simple and vague requirements: make a better campus map, I’ll spare you from the ranting about the old one, other than to say it wasn’t to much of a challenge.
The obvious pitfall of this type of development is that things often have to be redone/reworked, but on the other hand I can technically call each rework an “iteration of the life cycle” and I’m safe from the academics. Honestly though, we may have gone through several versions of the way we are using GML, but each time we learned something new that improved functionality and our understanding of the nature of the beast.
One of the things I like best about this form of development is that i can start tinkering on day one, and a product appears quickly, it is of course in a very ‘alpha’ state but there is something to show, and I like that kind of instant gratification.
As one last note, I will say that we reworked the database schema several times, attempting to arrive at a solution that would work the best for our needs, and I think as of today we are finally there! it took a lot of code rewriting and polishing but at this point, through each iteration, the code is better and more efficient and our database is designed to allow for maximum flexibility as well as being tuned to make getting the data we need easy and fast.
GeoRSS
GeoRSS is nothing more than regular RSS with x and y coordinates. It is also integrated into OpenLayers, and creating a layer directly from the RSS feed is easy, and toggling on and off these layers is also fast and easy. Another thing OpenLayers does with GeoRSS is that it creates popups on click automatically, using the description and title elements in the feed. Another thing we are doing with GeoRSS is allowing other departments on campus access our data, while not giving them direct access to our database. We have set up different query parameters that dictate what information is returned. Specific building info, search results based on descriptions and tags, and even complete point layers. Using this they can create their own maps using the IT map server to serve up the base map tiles, and their own interface using OpenLayers, and GeoRSS to quickly and easily make their own web maps.
Another nifty thing we are using GeoRSS for is the ‘You are here’ layer. When folks are on campus we are able to use their IP address to make an educated guess as to what building they are in and then create a GeoRSS layer by getting a feed that has the x and y for that specific building. If we are unable to determine what building they are in the layer doesn’t show up at all.
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GML
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GML is an excellent way to produce interactive features that can be overlayed on ones map. We stumbled upon GML early in our quest for an interactive map, we got most of our concepts from the open layers examples, and by looking at other folks’ maps and trying to duplicate and sometimes improving upon others functionality. We wanted a map that would be really interactive and would let users be able click on any feature and get information about it, and we wanted that information to be valuable and updated by the staff on campus that managed that information, for example we have accessibility information for the buildings around campus, and we want to allow the folks in Disability Services to be able to easily update the info.
GML is a XML standard for geographic data, it supports points, lines and polygon. OpenLayers, the javascript framework that renders the map in the browser, is unbelievably smart and can take the geometry of the feature, turn it into a Scalable Vector Graphic, and then overlay it on the map in the right place. Our GML file is created dynamically from the database. The query i use to gather the shape data is: SELECT astext(the_geom) as the_geom,gid FROM tble. there is also some text manipulation of the string produced by astext(the_geom) that is being done by php, but it is pretty minimal. you can directly access the values of the elements for each feature using javascript. So you could, and we did initially, store attribute data in the GML and then access it directly using javascript. We now decided to have as little information as possible in the GML, and then make an AJAX call to get the attributes from the database. This makes the GML smaller, and then in theory faster for OpenLayers to process, and it also makes the database query faster.
Politics
On Monday we are presenting to the Executive Officers of the University. Our bosses have been banned from the meeting, by their boss. so it will be just us. Two developers trying to enlighten those who make the decisions as to the wonders and potential of web based mapping. We have reworked our powerpoint to be less technical and more of a broad view of what this can do.
The potential of a tool like this is really limitless. Any spacial data that currently exists, and there is a lot of it, can be integrated into the map as an interactive layer. The part that takes the longest is gathering the data about each feature, but thanks to a back end interface making updates to map features can be done quickly and easily by non technical staff, by the people who really have a stake in the data.
The example we’ve used most commonly is that of Disability Services. Currently they have an access map that shows all of the features on campus that are pertinent to the accessibility of the campus. We want the folks who work in that office to have a way to edit attribute data for different features as it comes available to them. Say an elevator breaks in the Liberal Arts building. Instead of them handing it off to the IT staff and wait a couple of days for it to get posted, by which time the elevator may have already been fixed, they should be able to log in and quickly and easily update the info important to them and the students they are there to support.