A user-centred design framework for disaster risk visualisation
File(s)
Published version
OA Location
Author(s)
Twomlow, Anna
Grainger, Sam
Cieslik, Katarzyna
Paul, Jonathan D
Buytaert, Wouter
Type
Journal Article
Abstract
Visualisations are powerful communication tools that have the potential to help societies assess and manage natural hazard and disaster risks. However, the diversity of risk management contexts and user characteristics is a challenge to develop understandable and useable visualisations. We conducted a systematic literature review to understand the current state developing disaster risk visualisations following design best practices and accounting for the heterogeneity between end-users and disaster risk contexts. We find that, despite being widely recommended, tailoring visualisations to users through the process of user-centred design remains a relatively unexplored topic within disaster risk. To address this, we present a unifying user-centred design framework for disaster risk visualisation, based on existing visualisation frameworks. The framework contains three phases: the Define phase, which aims to define and characterise the disaster risk management context and end-user group who will benefit from a visualisation; the Design phase, which is highly iterative and presents an opportunity to test how users interpret different design elements; and the Refine phase, which focuses on evaluating how users understand, respond to, and make decisions based on the visualisation. The framework is sufficiently flexible to be applied to any disaster risk management and natural hazard context to identify challenges and design effective disaster risk visualisations that are understandable and useable.
Date Issued
2022-05-27
Date Acceptance
2022-05-16
Citation
International Journal of Disaster Risk Reduction, 2022, 77, pp.103067-103067
ISSN
2212-4209
Publisher
Elsevier BV
Start Page
103067
End Page
103067
Journal / Book Title
International Journal of Disaster Risk Reduction
Volume
77
Copyright Statement
© 2022 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd. This is an open access article under the CC BY license
(http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)
(http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)
License URL
Sponsor
Natural Environment Research Council (NERC)
Identifier
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2212420922002862?via%3Dihub
Grant Number
NE/P000452/1
Subjects
0502 Environmental Science and Management
1117 Public Health and Health Services
1604 Human Geography
Publication Status
Published
Article Number
103067
Date Publish Online
2022-05-27