Button design for weighted map overlays

Buttons or tabs are function keys on a computer screen that are designed to facilitate users' direct manipulations. One increasingly popular application of the button technique in a GIS environment is weighted map overlays for land suitability assessment. Here, buttons are coded with weighting values to indicate maps' importance to their associations. There are, however, a number of flaws in the existing button designs that can affect the quality of land-suitability assessment. In this paper, we first examine two common problems of redundancy and underrepresentation in button design, and then present a button system that is free from these problems.