man: Okay, so for our next talk,
we have Rich Treves,
who is at the, uh, geography department
at the university of Southhampton in England,
where he's a, uh, general sort of researcher
and educator,
and does a lot of work in the area of
Google Earth, Google Maps,
and how best to use them and design the things
that you're using them.
He maintains a blog called Google Earth Design.
And so today, he's gonna talk about GeoWeb
and its usability.
Treves: Thanks, John.
Um, so, yeah, there's the front screen.
And, uh, I'll tell you what I'm gonna go through
in the talk today.
Um, first of all, I'm gonna go off on a complete tangent
and talk about polygons and how much I like them
and we should use them more in Google Earth.
Um, then I'm gonna come on to the big challenge
of the 21st century, I think, for the human race,
which is global warming
and how this relates to Google Earth.
Then I'm gonna talk about are we misusing the GeoWeb?
I mean this in terms of design.
I mean this in terms of design of the people
putting this into Google Earth
rather than the actual design of Google Earth
or any of the other virtual globes
or Google map-type tools.
And to do this, I'm gonna explore lessons
from other technologies,
so I'm gonna talk about some other technologies
and how they developed.
Uh, I'm gonna de-- deconstruct
a couple of projects
from a design point of view, so...
Okay, so here I go, off on my tangent.
Uh, polygons rock. They're really good.
Um...what happens is if--
if you look at Google Earth, you'll see there's lots
of content which has--
which is in the form of place marks.
The place marks are a very common way
of putting information in Google Earth and...
Oop.
There's one there.
That's the, uh, Albert Memorial in Hyde Park in London.
And I mention this one because I did a--
a teaching exercise in London
at the royal geographical society,
which is very close to this.
And I had to teach them about how to use GPS.
And I gave them GPSs and I said,
"go out and mark the Albert Memorial,"
and the picture of it is down there.
And what I didn't say,
and I deliberately didn't tell them
is how they were supposed to mark it.
So I showed them how to mark points.
And I said, "just go out and mark it
the best way you think."
and what they did is they actually went out
and marked a polygon.
So they actually went out and they marked that square
rather than marking it as a point.
Which tells you that it--
these are social scientists I was talking to.
They aren't big on GIS or anything.
And they just get the idea that, actually,
the picture you can see, the Albert Memorial,
isn't a point.
It's more than a point. It's actually an area.
And the way it works in GIS
is lots of data is held in polygons
as tables of data.
So there's multiple bits of data
held within polygons.
Um, I thought I'd better show you a better example.
So in GIS, as I said, polygons are a lot more common.
Uh, this is an image of Big Island Hawaii.
And its lava flows you can see in color
coming down the Mauna Loa volcano there.
And each of those has to be a polygon.
You can't mark those different historical flows of lava
as a point.
And there's lots of analysis
for things like volcanic hazard go on
with that sort of data.
So it's held in a GIS system.
And what goes with polygons
is what's called an attribute table.
So there's lots--there's a whole table full of data.
I actually just pulled an image of any old attribute table,
so they don't actually match up here.
But, uh, you can see that you have rows,
which is--each polygon has a set of data
and you have the attributes there.
So what I've highlighted there is slope.
So each of those lava flows you can imagine having a slope.
And that helps in the modeling of where lava will go
in the future.
And there's an esri Google tie-up now,
and what I'm pondering,
and I'd be interested to know the answer to,
is how all the data that's held as polygons
in attribute table is gonna get transferred into Google
if we don't start using polygons more.
And when I talk to GIS people about Google Earth,
the thing they often come up with
is they start talking about polygons
and how it's the central way that they control data.
Okay, so briefly, what can you do with this?
Well, uh, I've had a go at building a tool
that works with Google Earth,
and this is just some sample data.
I've produced some random polygons.
They could be administered regions, whatever.
And this is in the Darfur region.
And the yellow and orange marks you can see there,
those are, um, damaged villages in Darfur,
and the red flames are destroyed images.
And I just counted them up and attached in a table
to those polygons.
And it allows you to produce thematic map--
thematic maps.
Um, and you can then, with the tool that we produced,
you can automatically color them in different ways
on the fly in Google Earth.
So in all kinds of teaching situations,
that's a--a useful thing.
I'm not gonna go into the technical details
of how you did that.
If someone wants to ask me afterwards, I'll tell them.
Um, but the nice thing is,
I just got some successful funding through
to play around with this,
and the tool I produced
wasn't in a form that I could release.
And what we're gonna go on is produce a customization
of Google Maps and play around with this idea some more.
So you'll see some more things about this in the future.
Okay, so on to the talk proper, really.
And to talk about, um,
usability, GeoWeb usability.
How to design things well to go into
GeoWeb applications.
And off, really, on another tangent here.
This is from a drugs education project
in the U.K. I heard about.
And they gave out pencils as part of their drugs education
with that message on, saying, "It's cool not to do drugs."
Now, the thing about pencils is you sharpen them,
and letters disappear.
In which case, the message of course changes a little.
And then you sharpen it a bit more,
and it gets even more emphatic about what you should do.
So they printed up loads of these pencils
and sent them out.
And then, of course, they had to not use them again.
Which goes to prove a great saying of mine
in most of what I do, which is,
"Just because we can does not mean we should."
Which is a very cheeky thing to do, to say,
actually standing in a Google office
built on things which are very good
for very good reasons.
Um...so that's a kind of back story.
The 21st century challenge, I think,
uh, the central challenge of our time
is going to be global warming.
And as a scientist who works with scientists as well,
it's communicating science change to the public.
We have to have them understand what's going on
to make decisions.
Because if we don't persuade them to stop using planes,
we're not going to solve global warming.
So it's the central challenge.
And I think the GeoWeb is the key tool
in that battle of trying to explain
global warming science to the public.
And David Attenborough.
I saw him at a Google Earth--
uh, Google outreach launch in London.
Put this a lot better than I ever could.
And he said Google Earth is
"a weapon of unparalleled value in the hands of all of us
who care about this greatly imperiled world."
so, uh, that's the importance. That's what we're going for.
That's why considering these is particularly important,
I think, in solving these problems.
Okay, so I said I'd talk about other technologies
and what lessons we could learn from other technologies.
This gartner's hype cycle,
and it applies to some technologies, as I said.
Not all of them, but lots of them go through
this sort of thing.
And what you've got on the left axis
is visibility.
So the visibility of the technology
and time on the bottom axis.
And obviously, start with, there's no technology invented.
And then it's invented.
So you have the technology trigger.
And then everyone gets very overexcited about it.
And then they realize that they got overexcited about it,
and actually it doesn't work in ways people thought it would.
And then finally, people work out how to use things well.
And we end up with a platter of productivity.
Now, I like this, but I think it's a bit overcomplicated.
So to explain it in a short period of time,
I've kind of simplified it.
And I just go with, there's the old.
There's the wrong.
And there's the right.
So let's have a look at some technologies.
Watches, and I'm gonna have some audience participation here.
So old.
This is a mechanical watch.
It's got no battery in it. You had to wind it up.
It's all little cogs and wheels.
Does anyone in the audience have a purely mechanical watch?
- Nope, no one. - Not on me.
Not on you, okay.
Good, nothing wrong with an old watch.
But it's expensive for what it does,
and you need to wind it.
This is wrong.
Now, this is a digital watch.
This is a particular type of digital watch
that came out in the 70s.
And to actually get the display,
you had to press the button to see the time.
Does anyone have one of those?
Okay, I'm glad, 'cause I'm saying that's wrong and really--
people could just for stylistic reasons like it.
But you had to press it to find out the time,
so you couldn't glance at your watch surreptitiously
in a meeting where you're getting bored
and find out what time it was.
And finally, now we've got things like this,
which is a mixed digital-analog watch.
So whatever takes your fancy,
whether you like analog or digital,
you can glance at it.
It's always on.
It's battery powered. You don't have to wind it up.
And it's much cheaper to produce
than the mechanical watch.
And I also like that example, because it allows me
to use this rather nice quote.
Okay, another one-- information index.
So books, books have indexes.
There are indexes of books.
The web came out, and we all got really excited
about indexes and hyperlinks.
But sometimes the hyperlinks were done really badly
and the indexing was done really badly.
So this is a particularly bad web page in terms of design.
Because it's got an index, and it links quite nicely
and that all works, thank you very much.
But you can't see it because of the terrible colors
that are being used in the banding.
And I'm not gonna actually show you the web page.
But if we could see it,
the guy has actually animated those colors
so they move.
Um, and it would give you all headaches,
so I'm not showing you that.
And, right, this is my home page.
That's what pops up when I open firefox every morning.
It's Google reader. It's indexed everything.
It works, it looks nice.
I understand what's going on with it.
So that's a particular aspect, really,
of the web I was talking about there.
Jakob Nielsen, who's a web usability expert,
uh, said that the lost decade of the web
was approximately 1993 to 2003,
when he says that in those years,
web design was actually abominable.
Um, so my thesis is that, really, we're going through
a kind of a lost decade of GeoWeb design,
'cause people really haven't learned
to use this technology properly.
And my arguments with watches and the web
is not a tight argument,
and I'll just try to put the idea across.
So if anyone thinks of some holes with those arguments,
that's fair enough.
But as I said, the central question is
"are we in the wrong phase?"
Are we in the lost decade of the GeoWeb?
So let's go in and look at an example.
This is the hurricane hunters.
And what you're looking at there,
that's an image of a plane track that's going across,
and these people take wind measurements
as the hurricane comes in.
And they record them.
And this person has published this.
I don't want to embarrass anyone,
so I'm not gonna say who it is.
But it's just I'm pointing out
some of the common mistakes that get made.
Um, and so they put it together,
and here are some obvious things
that aren't really working with this.
First of all, in the scale there,
the scale isn't an obvious blend.
What it's showing you is wind speed,
but red has appeared twice in the scale in different places.
So you look at red, you don't immediately know
what wind speed is referring to.
Those icons--I've expanded one in the top left.
That's a standard wind icon on meteorological maps.
And it works when it's one icon
separated by lots of space,
which is what you usually have on weather maps.
In this case, you've got lots of them packed together,
and you can't see them.
They all squish up.
So what I did is I did another version of it.
And I tried to improve the design.
And what I did, first of all,
I've cleaned up the scale there,
so it's a standard heat map scale.
So you can instantly get an idea of wind speed.
And the wind speed isn't within the icon anymore.
It's the--the color of the line there.
And also, what I've done with the icon
is they're little black slugs with white halos around them.
And that means on any background they will pop up,
and you'll be able to see them.
And you can't control what background
things plot over in in Google Earth,
so that's a good design point.
You can also see that the line
has got a gray halo around it, also,
to make it stand out.
So I hope you can see, from common sense point of view,
that makes it a lot more easy.
Oh, and I cleared up the number of, uh,
place marks as well.
I took a lot of them out, so it's not a crowded view.
This not an isolated case, and it's just one
where there was a number of things wrong all at once.
And I see lots of--lots of design problems like this
all over--all over the GeoWeb, really.
Moving over to the "places" column,
I'm not gonna talk much about this,
but one thing you can instantly see
is if you're a member of the public
who really doesn't know about this data,
that's a very complicated set of folders and structures,
and the icons with the circles and the holes in them.
If you haven't used Google Earth a lot,
you don't know what it is.
Um, so my version, I just simplified things,
and you can see in the places column there
I've just got a--
a set of very simple layers to click though.
So I'm standing up here talking about design,
but there are lot of things
that Treves does not understand.
There's a lot of things I don't get.
And the central thing is:
my criticisms when I talk about these things,
when I write about these things on my blog,
I'm drawing analogies from web design
and from static graphic design
and applying them to the GeoWeb.
I'm not sure that works.
I'm not sure you can do that straight off.
Other things is if you improve the design
in the ways I've described,
does it make it for the users a more memorable thing?
Does it make it more interesting?
Does it mean they spend more time on the site
looking at it?
All these questions, I don't know.
So, uh, I've been in negotiations,
and I've now just got a fellowship
sorted with SPLINT,
which is a consortium of british universities,
and we're gonna investigate some of these things
and answer some of these questions.
So, to conclude,
that's my, um, blog.
That's the address of my blog
if you're interested in reading any more about this.
First of all, I was talking about
just because we can doesn't mean we should.
And I went off on a tangent and talked about polygons
and how I think they're something
that we should be using more of in Google Earth.
And then I said an essential thing
we have as a challenge in the 21st century
is climate change
and communicating the science of climate change.
And I compared, really, the old wrong-right...
um, phases of some technologies.
And I said just as digital watches
have largely disappeared,
the ones that you have to press to see the time.
So I think we've got a phase here of design
and people not understanding design well
and having to communicate with the public,
particularly using tools like Google Earth.
And, really, the last thing,
I'd like to return to what David Attenborough said.
And if you remember, he said,
we live in a greatly imperiled world.
And we have in Google Earth a weapon of unparalleled value
for tackling that
and defending that imperiled world.
And my point, I think, essentially,
that now we need to learn how to aim that weapon.
[applause]
man: You talk about the period of time
where it was just a sort of lost period of, um,
of web design in the late 1990s
[man speaking indistinctly]
and by extrapolation, are we at that stage today?
There's very few books...
[man speaking indistinctly]
but that may change.
Treves: Yeah.
The question was, um,
as I mentioned, the lost decade of the web,
are we in that now,
and is it a lack of technical tools
and, uh, direction,
documentation of how to design?
I think you're exactly right.
I don't think we're actually lacking technical instruction
and technical tools.
I think they're all out there.
Um, but I think you're right.
It's lack of documentation.
And I hope my blog is doing something about that
as I'm talking about that.
Um, but yes, I think it's definitely a phase.
I think we're gonna go through it.
And what I think is we are gonna come out the other side,
but I prefer to get out there before ten years is up.
It'd be nice if we went through in five years, so...
Okay?