Development of a webgis for university campus using an approach based on user-centred design techniques

Abstract

The techniques that seek to attend the user’s needs in a product’s development, like the Requirements Engineering (RE) and the User-Centred Design (UCD) have been increasingly used in different areas. The RE is a computer science area that seeks the development of methods and techniques to software elaboration, while the UCD is an iterative design process, where designers focus on users and place them at the center of the development process. This study approached the application of these techniques to developing a WebGIS oriented to university applications. In this research an interface to the WebGIS was proposed, with an application to assist the navigation in indoor and outdoor environments. The study case was applied in Polytechnic Center campus of Federal University of Paraná (UFPR). The interface was evaluated through tests with users, using tasks that allowed to explore its functionality. The methodology used was elaborated by Brooke (1996) to measure the usability through the System Usability Scale (SUS), and the classification of this scale adopted by Bangor, Kortum and Miller (2009) and Sauro (2011). The results show punctuation indices based on the SUS, what indicated that the use of UCD techniques allow to improve the interface development in a WebGIS.