Understanding User Engagement and Revisitation for Spatial Decision Support Systems in Pollinator Ecology

Spatial decision support systems (SDSS) have potential utility in a wide variety of geospatial domains, including ecological informatics, site selection, urban planning, and hazard mitigation. User-centered design approaches are often used to characterize user needs, to develop prototypes, and to evaluate implementations of SDSS. However, we do not have a wealth of empirical results to draw upon when it comes to understanding why users want to use an SDSS or what qualities of an SDSS are likely to encourage their repeated usage. In this paper we highlight and contextualize results from recent work to design and evaluate an SDSS focused on pollinator health in support of beekeepers. We focus specifically on what factors seem to drive user’s desire to use a system more than once. Our findings help pave the way for future work to address this crucial challenge in SDSS design to ensure that our systems become seen as more than single-use platforms.