Table 2 Prompts and Questions for User Group 2

Round 1 (Discussion round)

Initial Prompt: Explore the Pennsylvania Cancer Atlas at: http://www.geovista.psu.edu/grants/CDC/ and comment on the following:

1. The data display methods used

2. The interactivity between the various information displays, and

3. The aesthetic design and usability of the interface

Please make separate contributions for each of the themes listed above and assign the appropriate theme to each contribution.

Round 2 (Open ended questions)

1. The Pennsylvania Cancer Atlas is targeted to public health professionals and epidemiologists with limited knowledge of cartography and information visualization. To what extent do you think this Atlas would be usable for them? Can you think of any features/functionalities/terminologies that are currently difficult for them to understand? Would you use a different strategy to present this kind of data to these experts?

2. Temporal analysis was brought up as an issue in the previous discussion part of this user study. Do you think an animation of the map to look at selected data over all the time periods would be a useful way to temporally analyze data? Please comment and/or suggest another method for temporal analysis

3. There is a white space in the right hand bottom of the page. We are thinking of making it a tabbed window, with one of the tabs having a scrollable interactive table listing the counties, incidence rates and counts. Can you think of other useful features that could be included in these tabs?

4. Currently, we do not have a method of saving, exporting or capturing the visualized data in the Atlas. Can you suggest one or more possible ways in which we can do this that would be useful to public health and epidemiologist users (in your opinion)?

Round 3 (Closed ended, survey style questions)

Responses to these questions include a five point categorical scale which ranges from "Strongly agree" to "Strongly disagree".

1. The Atlas has all the necessary functionalities to explore and analyze geospatial health data.

2. The Atlas is a novel approach to access and explore geospatial health data.

3. The brushing and linking techniques between the map, the frequency plot and the population pyramid is very useful to explore geospatial data.

4. Aesthetically, the Atlas violates all cartographic principles and design issues.

5. The Atlas will be very useful for the target audience who are not cartography and visualization experts.