Ordnance Survey has been providing accurate, reliable and detailed geographic information for business and leisure use for more than 200 years. Today they are a dynamic, modern organisation employing over 1400 people whose business strategy is to be the content provider of choice for location-based information in the new information economy.

A key goal of their strategy is ‘to develop a better understanding of the aims, objectives and applications of our users and customers to further refine the data and information we supply and thereby make it easy to adapt, use and exploit, not only today but in 2008 and beyond.’

System Concepts, a leading independent usability consultancy, has been working with Ordnance Survey to help them meet this goal, providing customised training to members of their Research & Innovation and Marketing areas.  The two day training course was customised to provide activities and examples based on on-going or completed OS projects, ensuring that the content was immediately relevant to participants and applicable to their role in the business.

By the end of the course, the participants had learnt the skills required to:

• promote the benefits of user centred design within Ordnance Survey (OS)
• identify current users of OS data and potential users who could increase OS’s target market
• identify why users choose OS data
• identify existing and potential users’ information needs
• carry out various data collection techniques
• develop prototyping techniques
• conduct user trials with prototypes

The course was extremely well received; one participant commented
“I think the course will be immensely valuable when we go back and apply the techniques learnt” while another said “Leslie was very clear and concise, the activities were superb and at the right time to engage the brain some more.  I came away with something I didn’t know beforehand. Thank you.”

Clare Davies and Lucy Wood, members of the 'GeoUsers' team within the Research & Innovation unit at Ordnance Survey, are keen to promote the benefits of user-centred design to the wider Geographic Information (GI) community.  Clare, Lucy and Leslie Fountain, senior usability consultant at System Concepts, recently presented a paper* together at the annual Association for Geographic Information (AGI) conference. This examined the benefits of ‘hearing the voice of the customer’, and the particular challenges of applying usability techniques to geographic information  and to the systems (GIS) that handle it.

The paper described how techniques for identifying users’ needs and evaluating how successfully systems meet those needs have been developed over the last 30 years, and have been incorporated into several international standards.  System Concepts has been involved in this process from the very beginning and helped to develop the main standard ISO 13407.

In the last few years the usability industry has grown enormously as its importance to the commercial success of e-commerce websites has been realised.  The paper went on to identify two main reasons why the application of usability techniques to the GI area is more challenging than standard website or office system development.

1.  GIS are very sophisticated specialist systems focusing on the manipulation of complex spatial information.  Not only the interface but the underlying content, concepts and structures need to be developed with a clear understanding of the needs of the end-user.

2.  GIS projects are often a complex mixture of general-use data, customisable toolkits and bespoke applications.  The customers using any one system and the applications for which they are using it are likely to be extremely varied, and their needs may conflict.

The OS team are working on ways to adapt the standard techniques to make them work in these more complex situations.  In an innovative application of the skills learnt in their training the paper describes how OS personnel are using usability techniques to talk to key end-users in their customers’ businesses, to help them identify trends and information needs for the more 'intelligent' GI of the future.

The paper concludes “If the specific challenges … can be overcome, a lot can be gained from it [usability] in terms of productivity, efficiency and reduced support and training costs. Future data and systems can both be improved by finding better, more effective ways to listen to 'the voice of the customer'.”

Clare Davies commented “I think we have seen some real change in the culture within Research & Innovation since we started promoting the user-centred ethos.  We found the training provided by System Concepts invaluable, both in raising the profile of user centred design and in helping us to develop the skills we need to apply it effectively.”

*Davies, C., Wood, L. and Fountain, L. (2005) User-centred GI: hearing the voice of the customer. Paper presented at: AGI '05: People, Places and Partnerships, Annual Conference of the Association for Geographic Information, London, UK, 8-10 November 2005. (London: Association for Geographic Information). Available online at:
http://www.ordnancesurvey.co.uk/oswebsite/partnerships/research/publications/docs/2005/ClareDavies_etal_geo.pdf

Image produced from the Ordnance Survey Get-a-map service. Image reproduced with kind permission of Ordnance Survey and Ordnance Survey of Northern Ireland.