Brian Kelsey

The increasing availability of geospatial data is creating opportunities for geovisualization tools to facilitate map-centred decision support. Geovisualization plays an important role throughout the decision making process allowing for the exploration and in-depth analysis of spatial data. Technical advances in geographic information systems (GIS) have led to a growth of interest in applications in public health, which minimize the inequalities of health care services.

This paper provides an evaluation of geovisualization techniques as well as usability testing methods involving interviews, user training, user task scenarios and questionnaires for use within spatial decision support for a community health centre. The centre uses geovisualization tools to explore socio-demographic and health-related indicators of immigrant health status. They further employ multi-criteria decision analysis for a needs assessment with the goal of locating a new facility in a high-priority

The focus of this examination is on the usability of map-centred decision support tools in the workplace with actual public health data. The results indicate that the functions available in CommonGIS are both useful and valuable to assist in the analysis ofneighbourhood health data. However, through the user testing a number of usability issues were identified. This paper includes a review of previous research in geovisualization and usability testing, describes and evaluates the methods used in the investigation and provides recommendations for improvements to geovisualization techniques.