Handling Data Spatially: Spatializating User Interfaces

The impact of GIS research extends beyond GIS. Our expertise about space, spatial relations, and spatial knowledge needs to be shared with other domains who can benefit from it, even if their problems are not inherently spatial. This paper discusses the needs for spatial expertise in the field of human-computer interaction. Modern user interface design increasingly employs spatial metaphors to structure objects and operations in understandable and useful ways. Spatialized user interfaces create a virtual space in which users perceive, operate, and move while they solve their application problems. The designers of these virtual spaces need to be informed about human spatial cognition and properties of spaces in order to design "usable" and credible spaces. They also need technological support for implementing spatial data structures or databases and procedures for accessing, navigating, and visualizing them. The paper investigates these needs, proposes a theory to address them, and shows how spatial data handling expertise helps to handle data spatially. .H\ZRUGV: Spatialization, spatial metaphors, user interfaces, usability, task analysis.