Open Data Based Digital Platform for Regional Growth and Development in Norway : A Heuristic Evaluation of the User Interface

Even though a homogenous growth is more desired and expected, socio-economic disparities can still be observed across different regions of a country. Measuring regional growth is essential for the regions that are falling behind or struggling to achieve desired growth. While there exists different statistics of regional growth data, there is a lack of digital tools that represent the growth data in a visual friendly manner to the different stakeholders involved in the region. We have developed a digital platform to address this issue for a region in Norway. The platform is developed to use open data from different sources that is presented in five major groups related to growth: goals, premises or prerequisites for growth, industries, growth, and expectations. The platform helps to improve decision-making and transparency, as well as provide new knowledge for research and society. Compared to other similar digital platforms from Norway, our platform has the strength of providing more options for visualization that makes the statistics more comprehensive. However, we believe that proper usability of the tool can be improved by getting feedback from real users. Therefore, a heuristic evaluation is conducted in order to find out the usability issues and further improve the tool for its users. In this article, we report the results of evaluation and implications for the future improvement along with the presentation of our tool.Vekstbaromete