NEW DEVELOPMENTS IN THE STRABOSPOT GEOLOGICAL INFORMATION SYSTEM (Invited Presentation)

We are developing a new version of the StraboSpot geological information system for field geology. This effort's emphasis is defined by the results from community reviews, evaluation of the users of the application, and many years of field testing to refine the User Interface and User Experience (UI/UX).

StraboSpot started its development in 2014. We set several design requirements at that time that seemed reasonable for the initial effort. First, the app should function as well on a phone as a tablet. This dictated the size of pages and operating by presenting a single page for input at a time. Second, it should run on iOS and Android devices, requiring us to use a suitable cross-platform development environment. At that time, the main option was to use the Angular/Ionic environment with JavaScript to create a web page application. Third, the application needed to interact with the GPS, camera, accelerometer, and magnetometer built into the mobile device. This was possible, but not easy to implement.

Our review in 2018 revealed that over 90% of app installations were on iOS devices that were tablet size. In addition, community feedback presented new design challenges, including constant map display, better integration of device orientation with measurements, enhanced abilities to visualize data, and better performance. For that reason, we began redesigning the UI/UX to a larger format for iOS devices. We selected the React Native platform for development as it allows for device-specific functions to be better incorporated either in that environment or using the iOS Swift language. It runs as a native application, so performance is enhanced. The system was field-tested in the summer of 2020 at a University of Kansas field camp, resulting in many modifications.