The inter-disciplinary field of GIS Usability is what I am interested in. This interest started a couple of years ago, when I finished my studies by writing a thesis on the "Development of a prototypical User Interface for Marine Biologists".
Back then I was part of a research group that participated in the European research project BASIS (Barents Sea Impact Studies). I was part of the technical group that developed a web infrastructure for all the research groups to dissipate and share data. What we detected was that none of the research groups was able to use the GIS techniques we offered. I then did an internship at the Institute for Marine Research in Bergen, Norway, where I showed the researchers what they could achieve with GIS (ArcView 3.2). The problem was that the GIS were too complex to grasp, that too many features were offered, that the technical jargon used in the GIS was intimidating, and that they were not willing to spend long hours learning it.
In my thesis I then prototyped an interface that offered new functionalities according to their needs. I restricted the number of features to a "normal amount" and I offered an interface that kept potential user errors to a minimum and that helped through the tasks.
Since then GIS have seen a lot of progress, e.g. the OpenGIS Consortium managed to have all important software vendors agree to their simple features specification, but there are still many things that could be improved.
As you can see in my CV I have done some teaching on User Interface Design with regard on GIS during the last years. There, a couple of ideas came to my mind, which would be interesting to work on, e.g.
But I am also interested in listening to other ideas, so please feel free to if you have an interesting position in this field of work at your institute.
