Native-Land.ca Map Review

This is the first in a series of map reviews. This is cross-posted with our blog, Digital Mapmaking.

See the accompanying video here.

Native-Land.ca is a hobby project that I started many years ago and has since grown into a large viral website and a non-profit organization. That process (the growth and nonprofit management) might be a subject for another post one day, but for now, I want to do the first of what will hopefully be a series of “map reviews”.

These will consist of looking over a map online, reviewing a few elements of it and seeing what we can learn, what they teach us about interactive map design, and if there are any improvements or interesting bits to chat about. Native Land is a fun place to start, since it’s my own map, and I’m very much aware of its various shortcomings and strengths.

Let’s get started!

Map Purpose

The purpose of Native Land is to put forward a particular argument, as it were, rather than to simply display information on a map. This speaks to an interesting part of web design; the designs and interactivity we put together can actually form a kind of implicit argument that the user accepts or rejects. This is an academic way of thinking, but interesting. Let’s take a look at Native Land.

The map immediately confronts the user with a huge, rather confusing mass of polygons, colors, and shapes, which totally cover North America (and much of the rest of the world). The point of this is to overwhelm the user with the breadth, depth, variety, and complexity of Indigenous histories and nations. This is an argument that pushes back against any simplistic way of looking at Indigenous history in North America.

Secondarily, the map invites the user to find their own location, or search places they are familiar with, to develop a personal awareness of Indigenous history.

Thirdly, borders overlap, speaking to a different way of understanding the idea of a “nation” and redirecting traditional Western ideas about borders.

Interactivity

The Native Land map has a few interactive parts:

• Map basics, such as zooming in and out and panning
• Typeahead Geocoder, augmented with custom results from the Native Land dataset (so you can search a location or a nation)
• Some mouseover effects and clicking for popups / sidebar information
• Searchable and selectable dropdowns for Territories, Languages, and Treaties

Backend

The backend for Native Land is going through changes as of the writing of this post. For most of its history, a Mapbox Dataset has served as the source of truth: we push to and pull from the dataset into a custom WordPress plugin, where we register every shape as a post for a custom post type, and assign extra fields for the “Data Pages” that you go to when you open a link for any particular nation.

However, we’re shifting that to go to WordPress as our source of truth soon; we’ll be storing all our shapes in the SQL database, and then building to Mapbox using Mapbox Tiling Service (MTS). We’re using Mapster WP Maps as the core of our backend. There are over 4000 shapes to manage, so it has to be done right!

Strengths

My temperament tends towards being somewhat critical when it comes to my own work, so I feel much more comfortable writing about the weaknesses of Native Land. That being said, let’s focus here on the strengths. I won’t be so much talking about the strengths of the idea of the project as much as the map itself.

• It gets its argument across (diversity, complexity)
• It is easily to search and click
• There is a lot of data on it at a reasonable level of accuracy
• It has a very research-friendly backend
• There are numerous options available (printing, labels, colors, magnification)

Weaknesses

For the weaknesses… well, as I said above, it’s easy for me to list these:

• The map is difficult to understand at a glance
• The mouseover effects make it hard to see where you are looking
• People don’t always see that there is an option to turn labels and colors on/off
• It’s hard to get past the “mess” that the map appears to be
• There is a lot going on in the interface

Review Summary

I think there are numerous improvements that could be made to the Native Land map in terms of its usability. In particular, the ease with which one sees different nations on mouseover and click, and the ability to see the land under these nations, could be much better. It can be confusing and difficult to understand which polygons belong to which nations without going to the individual data pages for those nations. This is a bit challenging, though, because so many different polygons overlap at a moment.

Overall, a big challenge of this map has been stuffing as few options as possible into a small space. It’s easy to think of many more options, legends to make the interface easier, and so on — but with millions of people visiting the map, it’s really important to make it work across all devices and serve the “simplest” user. More technical users will always dig in and find ways to use the map in more detail, but we want to make it obvious to anyone.

Overall, the project has a strong front end map for its purpose, but on a purely UX level, it could be improved.

Let's give it a 7.5 / 10!

That’s the map review for today!