In this course, you will focus on developing a GIS system and designing a project proposal, as well as, investigating some existing and new technologies. The nature of this course allows you to explore a project of your own interest such as a work project, personal interest, hobby, etc. You will develop your term project throughout the semester following published design methodologies that will culminate in a final proposal consisting of 8 stages (Figure 1, below). The course will culminate in a peer reviewed presentation and final paper.

Additionally, throughout the semester you will be exploring some existing and new technologies, including proprietary (ESRI) technology as well as open-source technology and data sources. The technology covered in the first 5 modules of the course will include WebGIS proprietary and open-source software, architecture, and data. Then, the last 5 technologies will focus on new technology trends including deep learning and GeoAI.

The Design process followed in this course, beginning with the problem statement and ending with the Unified Modelling Language.

Credit: Brandi Gaertner © Penn State is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0

In this module, you will begin considering the term project topic you will pursue throughout the semester, which can include any project based on a work project, a hobby, interest, and/or anything else you want to explore – the options are endless and should be interesting and valuable to you.

In this module, you will exploring several different themes to introduce you to basic geospatial design including different geospatial design methodologies, User Experience and Interface (UX/UI) design; Agile, Lean, and Waterfall Design methodologies, and Web GIS applications. Additionally, the technology you will be exploring this module is the ESRI Survey123, which is a frequently implemented software for mobile and webGIS due to its flexibility and interoperability. You will complete the ESRI Survey123 training course, which will culminate in an ESRI certificate, therefore advancing your professional development and/or GISP (if applicable).

The assignment will require you to discuss your term project topic idea in 1 paragraph, conduct a short literature search and bibliography, and justify the use of one or more geospatial design methodologies.

Assignments

Questions?

Please use the Discussion Forum to ask your classmates for additional suggestions as you are drafting your research questions. You can feel free to email me and I will strive to respond within 48 hours. I am also available for a phone call or Zoom meeting upon request.

Geospatial design incorporates the basic planning, structure, and features associated with different systems. The geospatial design will change depending on the type of project, application of the project, size of the project, and management. Several different geospatial system designs exist – as outlined below (see also Ananda et al. (2016) for more information).

Design 1:
Rebecca Sommer, 2001: quick guide to GIS implementation and management.

This is a general introduction to GIS design and includes various aspects of GIS. It is intended to provide a framework for approaches to GIS implementation and management. Therefore, the workflow or a subset of the workflow may have multidisciplinary applications (Figure 1).

Figure 1: The GIS design by Rebecca Sommer that outlines the GIS design process in two stages: GIS implementation and GIS management.

Credit: Brandi Gaertner © Penn State is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0. See also Somers, R. (2001) and Ananda et al., 2001.

Design 2:
Harmon, 2003. The design and implementation of geographic information systems. (Harmon & Anderson, 2003).

This GIS Design provides a more detailed methodology, and includes some business related steps and more specific geospatial design steps.

Figure 2: The Harmon (2003) GIS Design, which includes Needs Assessment, GIS Database, Implementation, Organization, and managing, as well as, specific details related to IT requirements such software, hardware, networks and business requirement such as staffing and user roles.

Credit: Brandi Gaertner © Penn State is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0. See also Harmon, 2003 and Ananda 2016. Note* Book not available through PSU library, however, book contents are publicly available.

Design 3:
Tomlinson, R. F. (2007). Thinking about GIS: geographic information system planning for managers (Vol. 1). ESRI, Inc.

This design incorporates detailed processes and relationships, as well as management and business steps and solutions.

Figure 3: The Tomlinson, 2007 GIS Desing approach, which includes a business and management approach.

Credit: Brandi Gaertner © Penn State is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0. See also Tomlinson, 2007 as well as Anada et al, 2006

Figure 4: The design followed in this course, which includes several components of each of the design illustrated in Figure 1-3.

Credit: Brandi Gaertner © Penn State is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0

When Design Goes Awry

So now that we've covered a few basics on good design, here are a few situations that can cause designs to fail:

Little/No Design Effort

This is probably the most common issue with respect to geospatial system design. Sometimes, there just isn't any money in the budget to really spend time thinking out and evaluating what should be implemented. Some customers don't see the immediate value in spending money on what may be perceived as an intellectual effort, when, in fact, it is essential for success to have spent some serious attention on design issues.

Design After The Fact

 Another common problem is the "Tool In Search Of An Application" that I'm sure all of you have encountered from time to time. Someone starts with a simple idea (e.g., a web mapping tool to disseminate emergency management information); a consulting group takes on the task and delivers what they think will work well. Eventually, a real person uses the tools, and it becomes clear that the tools do something new and exciting, but not something terribly useful. This leads to two related issues, first "I know what they need" and second "Build it and they will come." Both of these can lead to a lack of adoption, user resentment, and poor management acceptance and investment.

Scope Creep

Taking some time to design a new system can reveal all sorts of opportunities for new tools, data sources, output formats, etc... A common problem is managing all of the possibilities adequately so that the scope of the project does not continuously increase over time. The design focus may start with a relatively small problem area, and as momentum on the project builds, decision-makers and stakeholders all chime in, until eventually, you are responsible for designing One System To Rule Them All that is all things to all people.

UI: User Interface

UI is the user interface and refers to the way a person interacts with a web, app, or other design. UI is particularly important to geospatial design, since users need to efficiently move through the app and easily read the map to gather insightful information. UI focuses on the specific design features such as the buttons, dropdown menus, navigation, and layout design, which consists at a minimum of usability, accessibility, and aesthetics.

Usability refers to the user’s ability to easily navigate the app, gain immediate feedback on their actions, and intuitively understand the functions. For example, the ability to go forward/backward in an app needs to be clearly shown and intuitive. Dropdown menus, buttons, “hamburger icons”, settings, and other app features should have consistency, so the user knows what to expect.

Accessibility focuses on including all users in the design, including color blindness, sight impairment, hearing impairment, languages, and any other user barriers. The geospatial design needs to consider the color usage (for example, green and red aren’t accessible for color blindness), needs to be available on different size machines (phones, tablets, computers), needs to have text size features to accommodate people with sight impairments, and should be available with screen readers or other assistive technologies, among others.

Aesthetics is important for “marketing” to your preferred audience and includes the size, location, spacing of different features, color schemes, fonts and texts, and alignment. A geospatial design that is designed to appeal to an expert GIS analyst will be different than a design designed for novices. The aesthetics is the true “design” of a geospatial web app.

Figure 1: The different components of user interface requirements including usability, accessibility, and aesthetics. The center of the overlapping triangle represents the most effective designs.

Credit: Brandi Gaertner © Penn State is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0

UX: User Experience

UI is closely tied with User Experience (UX), and is often referred to as UI/UX, which defines the guidelines for “good” UI design. One of the most important features for UI/UX is emotional design, which aims to make an intrinsic connection with the users. Emotional Design has 3 basic considerations: Goals, Standards, and Attitudes (Ortony, 2022).

Goals refer to what a user wants to see happen and get done on an app. A designer must consider the “usability” of the app, so that users can easily access the app, complete their goal/mission, and continue to return to it because the app is easy and efficient.

Standards are our beliefs, norms or conventions of how we think the design should behave (Desmet, 2007). Standards drive the values that people have, moral expectations, social norms and expectations, and an expectation for how a product should work.

Attitudes represent a user’s immediate judgement for a design including their immediate dispositional likes/dislikes. To appeal to a user’s attitude, a designer must consider the aesthetic appeal of the app including the color, design, visual hierarchy, font/text, etc.

The overall goal of a good UI/UX design is to elicit a “wow” factor in your users.

Figure 2: The different components of User Experience (UX). Each circle represents one component, and the overlapping circles represents the most efficient design requirements

Credit: Brandi Gaertner © Penn State is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0

References:

Agile Design

There are many different design methodologies, but the most common methodologies in GIS and WebGIS designs are Agile, Lean, and Waterfall.

Agile design is a flexible and iterative approach to design, and one of the most recently implemented. It incorporates collaboration, feedback, and adaptability. This design methodology will iteratively update different parts of a design throughout the process, instead of completing one step and moving onto another step. This can be visualized as a cycle instead of a linear process.

Figure 1: The agile design process, in which design is an iterative approach with frequent feedback and revisions

Credit: Brandi Gaertner © Penn State is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0. See also Ananda et al, 2016.

Waterfall Design

Waterfall design is a linear and sequential process in which step 1 must be completed before moving onto step 2 and beyond. It is one of the earliest design methodologies. It focuses on development, system design, deployment, and then maintenance, but does not incorporate user feedback or iteration into the initial design process. 

Figure 2: The linear Waterfall design process, in which step 1 must be completed before step 2, and no iterative feedback is incorporated into the process.

Credit: Brandi Gaertner © Penn State is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0. See also Anana et al, 2016.

Lean Design;

Lean design emphasizes saving time and maximizing value in the design process, but also incorporates user feedback, user needs, and efficiency. Lean design focuses on eliminating wasteful resources in the design process by eliminating unnecessary steps. It focuses largely on user feedback and continuous improvement.

Agile and Lean Design often go together and are sometimes referred synonymously as Agile/Lean Design, since both focus on users' feedback and iterative design.

Figure 3: The lean design process, which focuses on iteratively incorporating user feedback at each step in the process

Credit: Brandi Gaertner © Penn State is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0. See also Anana et al, 2016.

Survey123 for ArcGIS is a simple and intuitive form centric field data gathering solution that makes creating, sharing, and analyzing surveys possible in three simple steps: ask questions, get answers, and make better decisions (ESRI definition).

Survey123 uses forms to collect information from people (or provide information to people) and can automatically detect their geographical location, so forms submitted are connected with spatial information.  Data gathered from Survey123 can automatically communicate with the ArcGIS platform of technology (Experience builder, ArcGIS pro, ArcGIS Online).  Survey123 can provide very powerful and detailed geospatial information from users and can be used to answer an endless amount of questions in numerous disciplines.

It has been used in a variety of disciplines including emergency response and environmental applications.

The example in Figure 1 is showing a Survey 123 used to investigate Emergency management in Oregon (Covey, 2024) – see the Public Home Damages Collection Survey below to see the application of Survey123 for emergency management.

Figure 1: An example Survey 123 survey used to investigate emergency management in Oregon.

Source: Covey (2024): Page 77 Figure 4: Public Home Damages Collection Survey

Survey123 has also been used for a variety of environmental applications, including tracking invasive species (Randall, 2022). The Survey123 form in Figure 2 below shows a user form for submitting information about the invasive species “Burning Bush” found in Valley Forge National Historic Park.

Figure 2: An example Survey123 showing a user form for submitting information about the invasive species “Burning Bush”.

Source: Randall et al (2002) page 6 Figure 3. “Survey123 entry for burning bush (EUAL). The page shows the name and image of the species and a dropdown option for species coverage at a specific point. The image was captured from a mobile phone Survey123 application”

References:

In the first set of readings, we will focus on setting the stage for understanding geospatial design methodologies and Agile/Lean design applications. You will also optionally choose to read one (or two) articles on the use of Survey123 in multiple disciplines. You will use the content found in these readings, as well as content, found throughout the module to answer the first technology lesson discussion post and complete the Term Project Topic Assignment.

This course is built around a term project that each of you will complete to integrate and apply your understanding of GISystem design in the context of an application scenario you choose. You will select ONE project option from the list below and complete a system design proposal. To a large degree, you will have the freedom to shape the specifics of your term project around a GISystem context that you desire. I hope that this allows you to either focus on a topic related to your day-to-day work or choose an area that sparks your curiosity.

As you will see below, all project options focus on a “design” and/or “plan” for something (a revised, extended, or completely new system for a specific application domain). Thus, your term project for this course will not be a finished product (i.e., you will not implement a new GISystem or carry out a full assessment or usability study of some existing system), instead you will produce a formal plan for such a product. A good way to conceptualize the term project that you will submit at the end of the term (following an iterative process of preliminary steps and feedback on each) is as a proposal appropriate for submission to a decision maker or funding agency, who would evaluate and decide whether or not to support/fund the idea.

A critical component of any successful proposal is to ground the planned work in relevant existing knowledge/guidelines. Thus, we will work through a series of steps in weekly lessons designed to provide you with (or reinforce existing) knowledge related to multiple aspects of geospatial system analysis and design, along with strategies for leveraging literature and other resources from academia, government, and industry that can help you fill in knowledge gaps specific to your chosen design/plan target. The set of activities in the lessons, along with feedback on your in-progress work, will enable you to end up with a well-organized, well-grounded design/plan that would be convincing to decision-makers judging whether or not to support doing what you propose.

Each week, you will notice at least one page of the lesson dedicated to a goal or assignment associated with your term project. Each week, you will also have one graded deliverable related to your final project. I've developed a project schedule that is designed to make sure you make steady progress on the term project and that also ensures that we have one full round of draft editing to refine your work.

Term Project Options

Here are five options you have for your term project. You should choose one of these options. If you have another project idea in mind that you think would work well, send me a note so we can talk about it. Your idea may be an excellent alternative to these pre-canned options,

• OPTION 1: A GISystem design proposal that incorporates the use of mobile devices to access and update geospatial data from the field in real-time.
• OPTION 2: A design proposal to audit a GISystem with the goal of proposing changes that will improve system functionality.
• OPTION 3: A design proposal for a GISystem application that serves the needs of a professional niche (e.g., forest management, city planning, etc…).
• OPTION 4: A design proposal that incorporates the use of a web portal to access and update geospatial data
• OPTION 5: A design proposal to apply Artificial Intelligence/ Deep Learning to established geospatial products and services.

Term Project Outline

1. Executive Summary: The Executive Summary (abstract) should motivate readers to study the full report. The executive summary is a short, powerful synopsis of the report, highlighting important needs, presenting key features of the proposed solution, and listing the significant benefits of the solution. It should be less than one page in length, address issues of greatest interest to decision makers, including pivotal technical and business merits of the conceptual design, and it should recommend desired responses to the proposal.
2. Table of Contents: The table of contents is a list, usually before the start of a written work, of the section titles with their commencing page numbers.
3. Background: This background section provides a background of the problem, explains the current situation, identifies the proposed solution to the problem, and provides of the overall objectives of the design and proposal. You will write this like a literature review and have sources/citations (around 10).
4. Needs Assessment: The Needs Assessment section discusses the different users of the system and how each of the users will be involved in the design project. This section also describes the different needs assessment options, which one you chose and why, and how you will implement the needs assessment in your proposal.
5. Concepts Considered: The Concepts Considered section describes the options explored by the design team in its search for a solution to the above problem. It should address both original ideas and those derived from other sources, summarize the scope of ideas considered and highlight the most creative and relevant concepts for the overall solution and for its component parts.
6. Concept Selection: The Concept Selection section describes the processes and rationale used for selecting the “best” concepts for the overall product and for the component parts of the design product. It may include summary tables comparing concepts against design criteria or summary evaluations of specific concepts.
7. Wireframe design: The wireframe design section includes multiple designs to show the user interface screens, arrow/explanations for each feature and screens of the interface, an explanation of the steps the user will take to navigate the interface, and a justification for the design.
8. System Architecture: The system architecture section describes the overall architecture and components of the design including the GIS workstations, software, hardware, network resources, database design, and requirements. You will also discuss the enterprise GIS requirements including performance considerations, maintenance considerations, and security considerations.
9. Data Storage: The Data Storage section describes in the detail the software you will use to house the design and the data you will use to populate the map.
10. Evaluation: The evaluation section will identify and explain the method(s) you will use to evaluate the effectiveness of your design, justify the final evaluation method you choose, and explain how you will implement the evaluation method.
11. UML Design: The UML Diagram will illustrate the system, actors, use cases, and relationships in your GISystem design. You will also include a short explanation of the diagram.
12. Cost/Benefit Analysis: The cost/benefit analysis section should explain AND justify the specific costs of the design.
13. Future Work: The Future Work section sets forth clear recommendations and rationale for project continuation. It summarizes the principal features of the product that satisfy users’ needs and provides an anticipated work schedule with milestones for the next phase of the project. Any unresolved issues should be highlighted at this time. Specific approvals for project continuation are requested here.