eStorys: A visual storyboard system supporting back-channel communication for emergencies
In this paper we present a new web mashup system for helping people and professionals to retrieve information about emergencies and disasters. Today, the use of the web during emergencies, is confirmed by the employment of systems like Flickr, Twitter or Facebook as demonstrated in the cases of Hurricane Katrina, the July 7, 2005 London bombings, and the April 16, 2007 shootings at Virginia Polytechnic University. Many pieces of information are currently available on the web that can be useful for emergency purposes and range from messages on forums and blogs to georeferenced photos. We present here a system that, by mixing information available on the web, is able to help both people and emergency professionals in rapidly obtaining data on emergency situations by using multiple web channels. In this paper we introduce a visual system, providing a combination of tools that demonstrated to be effective in such emergency situations, such as spatio/temporal search features, recommendation and filtering tools, and storyboards. We demonstrated the efficacy of our system by means of an analytic evaluation (comparing it with others available on the web), an usability evaluation made by expert users (students adequately trained) and an experimental evaluation with 34 participants.
Evaluation through scenario•n.a.Heuristic evaluation:•Analyzing results of questionnaire Experimental evaluation•Analyzing results questionnaireIn detail for the heuristic evaluation of the usability of the mashup application:Experts examined the interface several times and reported a list of usability problems in the interface, as well as positive aspects, about previously defined heuristics (compatibility, consistency, flexibility, learnability, minimal action, minimal memory load, perceptual limitation, and user guidance.
Literature review on existing systems and approaches in two main aspects related to our system:Back-channel communications (in the emergency systems domain) Geospatial Web paradigm together with mapping mashups
Four dimensions to categorize the literature and the mashup systems:SpatialTemporalCollaborativeSituational
Devised questionnaire after having screened a list of standardized questionnaires available in the literature.
Analytical evaluation:The system was evaluated by comparing it with other analogue systems publicly available. Heuristic evaluation: 12 expert reviewers examined the interface design to determine its compliance with a short list of usability principles.Experimental evaluation:34 participants performing three tasks answering to a questionnaire.
Show how current web social media, technologies and services, together with the presence of a huge amount of georeferenced materials over the web, can be easily and successfully exploited to create new geo-collaboration tools enabling back-channel communications during disaster situations.
Users liked the interface, the information organization, and the system tutorial. The system resulted easy to use and with good functionalities integration ( specially for being a mashup system (integration of different sources of information and systems e.g. google maps, flickr, and so on). Users criticized the aesthetic of the interface which could be enhanced The system resulted partially instable when tested on different browsers (this can be due to the peculiarities of the technologies which are always not completely standard when rendered in different browsers).
Experimental evaluation: Participants were asked to perform three tasks of incremental difficulty and to fill a post-task questionnaire using the eStoryS system.Three tasks to complete were related to the specific use of eStoryS in the domain of emergencies: Generic task, Required the use of a timeline to solve the task more efficientlyRequired the use of the story- board tool to collect information about the scenario.
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