HEUA-SDI: Usability Assessment of Spatial Data Infrastructures

This paper presents a systematic literature review and proposes a method, called HEUA-SDI, to evaluate the usability of spatial data infrastructures (SDI). This new approach jointly considers the subjectivity of users' opinions, assessing satisfaction, and usability heuristics, and assessing effectiveness and efficiency. The analysis is performed remotely, where, through tasks, the users themselves analyze the adequacy of the infrastructure to the usability heuristics. This enables the calculation of quantitative metrics and the qualitative identification of problems and solutions. This differs from traditional methods, generally based only on users' opinions or quantitative metrics obtained by evaluations from the perspective of system developers. The application of pilot questionnaires in 16 Brazilian SDIs demonstrated the effectiveness of HEUA-SDI, evidencing that the proposed method is comprehensive and can be applied to evaluate the usability of SDIs of various formats and purposes.