Interactive & Multiscale Thematic Maps:

Here, we describe an empirical study on the design of interactive and multiscale thematic maps. Interactive or “slippy” web maps are commonplace today, supporting a user experience of a “map of everywhere” that can be panned around the globe and zoomed from global to local scales. Slippy maps have revolutionized the design and use of reference maps—as billions of mobile device owners now carry a reference map of the entire planet in their pocket—but is the same true for thematic maps? Evidence is building that more interactivity is not always helpful (e.g., Davies 1998; Keehner et al. 2008; Jones et al. 2009; Dou et al. 2010; Roth and MacEachren 2016). In this presentation, we examine if different thematic map types of the same attribute information lead to different user interaction strategies, and if particular interactions with these thematic maps lead to improved or incorrect understandings of the underlying spatial distributions.