09-11, 13:00–13:30 (America/Chicago), Grand B
UI/UX requires a coherent vision and style to succeed. However, the openness and flexibility of FLOSS can, notoriously, make that difficult. We look at lessons learned when our GIS team collaborated with a team of UI/UX students.
The City University of New York (CUNY) Mapping Service creates civic focused web maps and provides geospatial analysis around issues like the US census, legislative redistricting, and housing. Over the last several years our team has transitioned to a FLOSS stack. FLOSS provides flexibility that proprietary solutions cannot match. This flexibility has been an indispensable asset to our web mapping team as we have been able to use the same stack to tackle a wide variety of projects. However, a successful user interface requires a consistent style and a good user experience demands a coherent plan, both of which are inherently difficult to forge given too many options. Thus we found, at least at first, that the open-endedness of FLOSS solutions were a UI/UX hurdle rather than an asset. Last spring, we teamed up with UI/UX students at Pratt Institute to come up with solutions for one of our more complex and data heavy web maps: The Long Island Zoning Atlas. The Long Island Zoning Atlas shows what types of housing are allowed across all of the 1200+ zoning districts on Long Island. The map can be filtered based on various different housing ordinances. Overlays show school districts, police precincts, congressional districts and more and selecting a zone brings up further information on each of these categories. Our collaboration with the class from Pratt led to numerous improvements which will be released with next update of the site. This talk deals with the particular UI/UX challenges we confronted when given the freedom of FLOSS and the larger lessons we learned.
Will Field is a Senior Application Developer at the City University of New York (CUNY) Mapping Service where he works with his team to develop web maps dealing with various civic issues. He enjoys applying his animation and computer graphics background to solve the unique technical and creative challenges of web mapping.