Abstract
Historical survey maps are important artefacts to trace ownership succession, name changes and the whereabouts of culturally significant sites, for instance here in Aotearoa New Zealand, where Indigenous Māori lost their ancestral land due to colonisation. We developed a prototypical web interface to be used by our Māori collaborators to search and explore 80 georeferenced historic maps based on their location, contemporary land features as well as map-specific metadata and annotations in support of reconnecting whānau (family) to whenua (land). In this article we report on a study in this Indigenous context where inherently access to usability and domain experts is difficult. We present the results of a small-scale user study where we used a novel approach of a “guided heuristic evaluation” which did not require the involvement of usability experts but still resulted in consistent findings regarding usability violations.