In the afternoon of our 10 year anniversary, a mixed group of experienced QGIS users and developers from OPENGIS.ch got together to take a close look at the Graphical Modeler tool in QGIS.
Example of a processing model
This tool is not known, let alone used by all QGIS users. In an initial round of feedback on the current functionalities, it became clear why: the GUI is not intuitive, it is cumbersome, unresponsive and misses some essential features. Of course, not all is negative. The tool already allows for some very complex chaining of processing algorithms. But it could be so much more and offer its potential to a much wider user community.
Initial feedback round
The goal of this workshop was to identify specific pain points of the current version, collect ideas for improvements and define priority actions.
Based on the first feedback round, the participants easily agreed on three main work topics: Graphical User Interface (GUI), Integration within QGIS and Productivity.
This led to the following questions:
- How might we improve the user experience (feeling of the GUI)?
- How might we improve the integration within QGIS?
- How might we improve productivity (development, debugging, analysis of results)?
Brainstorming in groups of 2-3 people, specific actions to answer those questions were formulated. After the collection and presentation of the found actions, every participant voted for a total of 5 action points.
We ended up with a list of seven action points from the three main topics that were clearly identified as having a high priority for the users. Number one in the ranking was: adding information about the number of objects at every node of the processing model (topic Productivity).
In the last step, the priorities were distributed along a Gain vs. Cost graph.
These workshop results will be a very useful starting point concerning the processing tools in QGIS. We have the chance that the QGIS Swiss User group just financed some days of development to improve the Graphical Modeler, so we know how and where to start!
We would like to thank all the participants once again for their contribution! We are very glad with the various priorities that have been identified and we look forward to playing our part in making the Graphical Modeler a complete and intuitive tool.
