Buffer Region: Reifying Buffer Analysis for GIS Professionals

Geographic Information System (GIS) is widely used by professional map makers for supporting tasks such as decision-making process. However, GIS has been considered as hard to use and not user-friendly and remains unchanged for decades. In my thesis, I am aiming to find out design solutions that help GIS professionals in using GIS. I interviewed 13 professional map makers to understand tasks performed by professional users and problems they have. I found out three problems professional users have with GIS: Lack of support for exploration, hard to learn and use for early career professionals, and lack of support for customizing visualization; two strategy they used: visualizing data for understanding and getting feedback, and overlapping for analysis; and two patterns across their use of tools: they use distance as core criteria and their object of interest switch between layer and elements within layer. Based on my interview result, I iterated my design with three prototypes: mask focusing on reifying methods applied to layers to reduce repeated work and support exploration, bubble focusing on reusing the parameters to reduce repeated works, and finally buffer region reify the process of creating buffer area with direct manipulation, for supporting early career users and user task of exploration