USAGEO: MÉTODO PARA AVALIAÇÃO DE USABILIDADE EM SISTEMAS AGRÍCOLAS

Abstract

The use of agricultural systems that consider the spatial dimension attributed by the use of Geographic Information (GI) brings benefits to agriculture. Applications that use GI face usability difficulties due to the expansion of its use, growth in the amount of geographic data, the advent of the Internet, diversity and increase in the number of users. Among the research needs related to agricultural systems is the development of an evaluation method that considers the specificities of the geographic information. In order to solve the problem, this work presents the UsaGeo, method for usability evaluation in agricultural systems. The method presents quantitative and qualitative results, requires a specialist in usability and accessibility for its execution and consists of four phases. UsaGeo was applied in four case studies and it was found that it identified problems related to the geographical information that would be difficult to be detected by methods recurrently cited in the literature. The application of UsaGeo in agriculture allows the creation of software products with greater usability, increases the rate of adoption of these systems by farmers, increases productivity for the sector and generates an increase in the expansion and exploitation of the use of geographical information..