Guidelines for trust interface design for public engagement Web GIS

Attesting to the powerful capabilities and in technology trends, many scholars envisioned the consolidation of geographic information systems (GIS) into vital tools for disseminating spatial information. GIS are presently used to inform, advise and instruct users in several contexts and to further engage citizens in decision-making processes that can impact and sustain policy development. Interaction with these applications incorporates risk and uncertainty, which have been repeatedly identified as preconditions in nurturing trust perceptions and which instigate a user’s decision to rely on a system and act on the provided information. Research studies consistently demonstrated that a trust-oriented interface design can facilitate the development of more trustworthy, mainly e-commerce, systems. Trust in the Web GIS context, despite its significance, has only relatively recently received some attention. A set of human–computer interaction (HCI) user-based studies revealed some Web GIS trustee attributes that influence non– experts’ trust beliefs and found that when these are problematic or absent from interface design, users form irrational trust perceptions, which amplifies the risk and may impose dangers to the user. These Web GIS trustee attributes that influence non-experts’ trust perceptions are formulated here into a set of trust guidelines. These are then evaluated using the PE-Nuclear tool, a Web GIS application, to inform the public about the site selection of a nuclear waste repository in the United Kingdom. Our preliminary results indicate that the proposed trust guidelines not only support the development of rational trust perceptions that protect non-experts from inappropriate use of Web GIS technology but also contribute towards improving interaction with such applications of public interest issue.