Interactive Web Maps: Usability Heuristics Proposal

Abstract. With the evolution of technology, maps have changed how they are produced and consumed. In the 1990s, along with the internet uprise, printed and digital maps began to be shared and viewed on the web, which provided more significant user interaction with the map and geographic data. However, the ease of creating interactive maps using computational resources sometimes neglects cartographic concepts, impairing the interpretation of geographic data and the quality of the interaction between user and system. This work presents ten specific Usability Heuristics for Interactive Web Maps to identify and elaborate a set of criteria that help create and evaluate the quality of interactive web maps. For this, we used a methodology to develop domain-specific Usability Heuristics, composed of eight steps. This paper presents the ten heuristics elaborated along with the attributes of the name, ID, category and definition, and an additional checklist. This new set encompasses both the concepts of cartography and usability, contributing to better user interaction with the system and geographic data.