The addition of the distance calculation has enabled canals to be selected more easily, however it would be useful to have a maximum distance from the canal within which the selection is triggered, to avoid accidental mouse-clicks from removing previous results. The map is colour-blind friendly, and allows for quick searching of POI along the canal network.
The layout is not fully optimised for mobile usage. The addition of a toggle button on the left-hand window would allow for an increase in the map area on smaller mobile screens. Further updates to POI locations are needed to allow for increased accuracy on the measurement of distances. This would create a more useful dataset, as currently a large number of especially rural pubs on the canal network are not included as they were plotted in the wrong place and excluded from the original spatial selection.
The grouping of canals in the dropdown menu as alphabetical does not provide the best user experience as a number of branches and arms leading off the main canals are present in the first part of the list, many of which do not have POI on. They are also less likely to be selected than the main canals. Grouping branch canals by their associated main canal may improve this aspect, but it was not explored due to time constraints.
The map refresh rate is slow to start with, but not unusable. The addition of more canal networks, more POI, locks and cruising time calculations in any enhanced versions of the webmap are likely to need a PHP server to limit the data being processed by the client and ensure that the map remains usable. Only refreshing part of the map or updating rather than redrawing all features would provide a gain in performance.
Cruising time was not calculated as originally intended since the CRT lock layer was not added due to time constraints. It was decided that the distance to the POI was useful enough to demonstrate proof of concept. Cruising time will always be an estimate as there are likely to be queues for the locks in peak time.
The table below shows potential future updates and their priority.
| Future updates | Priority |
|---|---|
| Update lat/long coordinates to pub database | High |
| Toggle button for mobile devices | High |
| Include links to POI in results table | Medium |
| Create PHP database | High |
| Add additional filters/POI | Low |
| Add locks and navigation time | Low |