Proceedings of the 12th European Conference on Knowledge ...

Nadine Amende
such as “What are you doing?”, “Why are you doing this? and “What are you thinking?” to remind <strong>the</strong>
participants to think aloud. Audio recordings and transcripts <strong>of</strong> relevant passages were made.
All participants answered post session questions on a 5-point-Likert scale about relevance <strong>of</strong> common
search criteria such as price, number <strong>of</strong> bedrooms etc., and <strong>of</strong> spatial criteria such as street, district,
location, environment and distance. They also had to answer questions about relevance <strong>of</strong> geo maps
for real estate search, satisfaction with current search portals and efficiency and effectiveness <strong>of</strong>
information seeking by means <strong>of</strong> geo maps.
The think-aloud-study reveals that 13 participants tried to get some information about <strong>the</strong> location, 12
participants needed information about <strong>the</strong> distance to a specific place, e.g. place <strong>of</strong> work or city
centre, and 11 participants needed information about <strong>the</strong> environment to find relevant apartments.
These information were not directly and intuitively available. 8 <strong>of</strong> 16 participants used <strong>the</strong> district
criteria to find relevant apartments. A specific street as criteria to find relevant apartments was only
mentioned by 2 participants. Thus, a visual representation <strong>of</strong> this information is important for end
users to get an imagination <strong>of</strong> <strong>the</strong> location, e.g. where <strong>the</strong> city centre is, to know where districts are or
a specific street is, how <strong>the</strong> environment looks like and to know <strong>the</strong> distances to a specific place.
Results <strong>of</strong> <strong>the</strong> post session questionnaire also illustrate <strong>the</strong> importance <strong>of</strong> spatial criteria (see figure
4a and 4b).
Figure 4a: Results <strong>of</strong> spatial criteria, group 1: known city
Figure 4b: Results <strong>of</strong> spatial criteria, group 2: unknown city
Besides some slight differences between <strong>the</strong> groups, <strong>the</strong>re can be seen a trend towards importance
<strong>of</strong> <strong>the</strong> criteria environment, distance, location and district. The summarized frequency over both
groups and both values (very important and important) for every <strong>of</strong> <strong>the</strong>se criteria is 10 out <strong>of</strong> 16. The
street criterion is not important.
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