14. Collaborative Interaction with Geospatial Data—A Comparison of Paper Maps, Desktop GIS and Interactive Tabletops

Over the last two decades, researchers have thoroughly investigated the benefits and challenges of large interactive surfaces, highlighting in particular their potential for efficient co-located collaboration and coping with rich content (complex diagrams, multi-layer digital maps, etc.). However, comparative studies that actually evaluate the same tasks on tabletops and other types of systems are still scarce. We have identified crisis management (CM) as promising application context, in which to study such tasks. In CM, people from different organizations use, among others, large paper maps to establish a common understanding of a critical situation, and plan and coordinate appropriate countermeasures. What sets CM apart from other application areas are the very formalized (and different) user roles, and the variations in completeness of the operational picture between involved organizations, both necessitating regular information exchange and collaboration in planning. Based on these characteristics, we have designed a system for interactive tabletops that facilitates collaborative situation analysis and planning by users having different information and planning functionality available. We have then conducted a comparative study, in which 30 participants performed tasks reflecting actual CM work on the tabletop system, classical paper maps and an off-the-shelf desktop GIS. Our goal was to quantify the benefits of tabletops w.r.t. performance, usability, and teamwork quality. We found that users were most efficient using the tabletop and perceived its UX as superior; also, the tabletop offered a teamwork quality comparable to classical paper maps. This indicates that tabletops may indeed be a valuable tool for collaboration in crisis management, and, more generally, for all application areas in which users with different roles collaborate around geospatial data.