I’ve created Conceptual Design Documents to communicate design goals and interaction flows of the Feature Inspector Functionality in Autodesk MapGuide Selection Enhancements to different stakeholders for different purposes:
- To be used by Senior Developers to clarify Use Case Documents further;
- To be used by Quality Assurance Engineers for high level test planning;
- To be used by User Researchers for planning of Usability Testing/Concept Validation.
Designing Complex Web Applications
Autodesk® Infrastructure Map Server software — formerly known as “Autodesk MapGuide” — is web-based GIS mapping software that helps planning and engineering professionals publish and share CAD, GIS maps, and asset information quickly and cost-effectively on the web. Web-based dashboards and reports help stakeholders access, visualize, and coordinate enterprise data with workers in the field, operations and customer service personnel, and the public.
User Problem
Given the constraint of the legacy UI framework of MapGuide, the current way to select features in the application makes it difficult for users to distinguish one specific feature out of a selection group [1], since you can’t visualize the attributes of multiple features at once, neither you can “browse through” a selection set [3];
Design Opportunity
Once User selects multiple features across multiple layers, providing a new pick-list (called “Feature Inspector”) would allow them to select which features to – regardless of which layer it belongs to – select/operate on.
