Category Archives: software

FME World Tour 2014

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Another great guest post, this time by 2 of EDINA’s geodata team James Crone and Mike Gale. James and Mike attended the Edinburgh leg of FME’s 2014 World Tour which was held at Our Dynamic Earth on Thursday 15th May. EDINA use FME through Safe Software`s FME Grant Program.

FMEThe day consisted of a series of presentations covering new features of the latest 2014 release of FME and how FME is being used locally within Scotland and the UK. The quality of the presentations was very high being pitched to a technical audience and presented by an enthusiastic set of presenters who in many cases were not afraid to start FME Workbench up, build/edit geoprocessing workspaces up and then run them live in front of an audience. In doing so brilliant tips on how to use FME Workbench more efficiently were demonstrated. There was also a lot of audience participation to break the formal presentations up including an FME Cool Wall and the FME Quiz, more on which later.

Of the presentations, our highlights were:

Managing the Angus Council back-office and supporting the GI infrastructure with FME

During this talk, the presenters from the Angus Council GIS team, who introduced themselves as sharks with lasers, demonstrated the wide use that FME had been put to within a Scottish local authority, Angus Council. Through some FME workbench wizzardy FME processing flowlines were used to help with the planning process (applications for Wind Farms) and harmonising LLPG (Local Land and Property Gazetteers) data. One great quote that came from this presentation was that FME allowed Angus to provide “A single version of the truth� – which if you have ever worked in a local authority you will completely understand!!!

FME`s MapnikRasterizer makes happy cartographers.

Mapnik is an open source map renderer initiated by Artem Pavlenko and tiles rendered through Mapnik provide the default layer in OpenStreetMap. We`ve been using Mapnik for some internally within EDINA to render geospatial datasets directly from Python without the need to go to the trouble of firing up a GIS application. In this talk David Eagle from 1spatial ran through the features of the new FME MapnikRasterizer. The FME MapnikRasterizer is an FME transformer which can be dropped into any FME Workbench Workspace and used to create a map rendering of features being processed which is pretty cool. Combining this with other transformers to create tilesets makes things even more interesting. One of my pet hates is having to manually set up styles using GUI`s, it being more efficient to do so in an external file, with this in mind one of the things shown during the presentation is that the MapnikRasterizer can be supplied with the sets of styles to be rendered coded up in an external spreadsheet which is neat.

Slides: http://www.slideshare.net/SafeSoftware/fmes-mapnikrasterizer-makes-happy-cartographers

FME process optimisation, an exercise in best practice at the Ordnance Survey

In this talk, David Eagle talked about how FME technologies sit at the heart of the data update/verification process used by the Ordnance Survey to keep MasterMap up to date and how they`ve been able to optimise the processes to make things more efficient. This included some best practices were are shown in this set of slides:

Slides: http://www.slideshare.net/SafeSoftware/best-practices-in-fme-2014

BIM – Building Information Modelling

 

While not included directly as a presentation – it is clear that one of the hot topics at the moment with FME is BIM. Several of the talks referenced BIM and indicated large expected future use. As the UK Government is planning to adopt BIM as a data standard in 2016 the demand for BIM data is going to explode over the next year. Speaking directly with one of the guys from 1Spatial – FME can currently read BIM data but not write to the format. This is all about the change with a BIM writer currently being designed and a beta release is scheduled for September. So currently it’s a case of watch this space

UK BIM Task group: http://www.bimtaskgroup.org/

If the UK leg of the FME world tour get around to uploading presentations of the event this is where you can find them: http://worldtour.safe.com

Outwith the formal presentations, the wonderful 1spatial people ran 2 sessions to generate audience participation – the FME Cool Wall and the FME Quiz.

Most people should be familiar with BBC Top Gear`s Cool Wall where Jeremy Clarkson et al place a picture of a new sports car on a wall divided into sections indicating how cool the car is from uncool to cool to subzero. Well at the FME World Tour, the audience split into 4 groups, each group came up with 3 new features of FME or how FME was being used and these were then added to the FME Cool Wall.

Across the groups the ability of FME to perform complex geoprocessing without any need to write code was a resounding subzero coolness although at the same time the sometime bewildering number of transformers available in FME Workbench and knowing which one to pick when 2 or more seemed to do similar things was uncool.

The day finished off with the FME Quiz in which a series of multi-choice questions on all things FME were shown and the audience had to reply via email on their smartphones. EDINA won the prize for the first question as we twigged early on that setting up an email in GMail so that we could quickly submit our answer was a good strategy. As it was the first question, Mike and I got the first look at the prize swag on offer and grabbed a pair of FME World Tour 2014 t-shirts in a lovely shade of olive green with an FME dirgable on the front and a series of tour dates listed on the back.

So overall a very useful and extremely useful technical day and thanks to the highly enthusiastic 1spatial team for all the insights into FME.

Usability lab on a shoestring budget

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Usability testing should be an important part of the development of any user interface. Ensuring that the interface is intuitive and easy to use is critical for its success. However, running usability sessions with real users often strikes fear into project teams. They assume that it will be a costly and time consuming process and will confuse as much as it clarifies the design process.  This article aims to demonstrate how easy it is to set up an effective usability lab on a shoestring budget.

Background

The USeD project aims to improve the interface of a data download website which provides   spatial data to the education sector in the UK.  User testing is an integral part of the USeD project and carrying out iterative assessment exercises will drive the development of the interface.  However, the project budget is quite modest and most of it is assigned for designing and coding the interface.

A discussion with our usability expert on the usefulness of various techniques suggested that most issues with an interface could be identified using quite simple techniques such as task-based exercises. Eye tracking allows testing to focus on very specific problems and it was better to identify general issues first before considering advanced techniques.

User Task Based Testing

Task based testing centers around setting users a series of small, distinct tasks that have been designed to test the functionality of an interface.  The initial tasks should be quite straight forward but later ones can be more involved allowing sessions to explore more advanced aspects of the interface.  Tasks should give the user a clear understanding of what they want to achieve but should allow them the flexibility to explore the interface. This flexibility can reveal how users discover functionality in the interface.  In these testing sessions we have 6 tasks and each session will last up to 45 minutes. Any longer than this and it is probably that the user will tire and loose focus.

So, how can you set up an effective user testing lab in your own office using pretty much “stuff” that you find lying around or “borrow”, temporarily?  The recipe below describes how we went about the task.

Ingredients:

  • 2 rooms, close together or preferably next to each other
  • 2 computers
  • 3 screens
  • 1 web cam
  • 1 mic
  • 1 set of baby monitor
  • A sprinkle of free software
  • 1 really helpful systems support person

First of all, having two rooms is a huge benefit as it means that the only the candidate and the facilitator (person running the test) need to be in the test room. This reduces the stress on the user during the test so that it feels less like a test. A nervous or flustered user will not interact with the interface in a naturally which may affect the results of the tasks.  Having the rooms next together makes things much easier as you can run cables between them.

Test lab

Test Room

  • Set up a computer that is typical of the ones you expect users to access the interface through in normal use. If users are likely to use a laptop or a 15 inch monitor, it would be unfair to run the test on a 21 inch monitor.
  • Set up a web cam that shows the user and the facilitator. This should be set up in an unobtrusive way and is to monitor general body language rather than detailed facial expressions or eye movements.
  • Position the transmitting part of the baby monitor so that it will pick up the conversation
  • Place a microphone dictaphone to capture the conversation between the candidate and the facilitator. This is really just a back up in case parts of the conversation get missed.
  • Make sure you provide some water for the candidates and a bit of chocolate never hurts.

Observation room

The observation lab can be set up in various ways but if you have access to two monitors then this makes things easier.

  • Set up the computer with a “Yâ€� splitter to two monitors. Monitor 1 will show the users screen and monitor 2 will display the webcam feed.  Set the monitors up about 1.5m away from the observers.  This will give them room to make notes and setting the back a bit means that they can easily scan both monitors at the same time without the “watching tennis” effect.
  • The receiving part of the baby monitor will provide the live audio from the other room.
  • Remember some water and chocolate or sugary sweets to keep the observers alert

 

Observation room


Porting the display

To display the users screen, we used some free software called “Zonescreen�. This has to be installed on both computers. Once installed, start ZoneScreen on the machine in the user lab, set this to as the HOST. Make a note of the i.p address. On the computer in the observation room, start ZoneScreen and set the session to REMOTE and enter the i.p address of the computer in the other room. You should now be able to see everything that happens on the user computer.

Webcam

The webcam feed is a little bit trickier. We experimented with broadcasting this across our network, but there was often a lag of up to 20-30seconds which made it very difficult to follow what was actually going on. As we had the luxury of having two rooms next to each other, we were able to connect the webcam to the computer in the observation lab. To do this you need a powered USB extension. The 10m extension we used occasionally failed, possibly as the power attenuated along its length. Replacing this with a 5m cable solved the problem.

Results

This set up worked really well.  The observers were able to see the candidates screen, hear everything that was said.  The webcam was useful to give everything context.  You could tell when the candidate had turned to speak to the facilitator and you could monitor their general body language.  There was only the slightest delay on the screen display feed, but this did not cause a problem. The baby monitors might seem very low tech but they are reliable and effective.

So, what did all this cost?  All the software was free and well we scavinged everything except the 5m powered usb cable and the baby monitors.  The total cost of this equipment was £40.  A huge thanks to Nik, EDINA’s small system support officer, who managed to find the software and put the lab together.