Case Study: Geographic Data With or Without a Map

The problem

Many governments, including Las Vegas, relied on expensive enterprise GIS software systems to answer most spatial questions — parks, polling locations, elected officials — typically by returning a map. Maps may feel like the obvious tool for geographic data, but for most residents, they’re actually a barrier. Reading a map, orienting to it, and interpreting it takes a kind of literacy that not everyone has or wants to use just to answer a simple question like “is there a park near me with a playground?”

That barrier was especially acute in Las Vegas at the time: the city was growing by roughly 60,000 new residents a year, meaning thousands of new arrivals every month who weren’t yet familiar with the city’s geography, let alone equipped to navigate a map of it.

The reframe

Building on the citizen-focused redesign of the city’s website (see the “Reimagining Government Services Around Citizens” case study), I questioned the convention that spatial data must only be presented spatially. The map wasn’t a neutral container for the information — it was itself a design choice, and not always the right one. What residents actually wanted wasn’t a map; it was an answer: “Where is the nearest park with tennis courts?” “Who is my councilperson?” “Where do I go to vote?”

The solution

I designed web and mobile applications — including a park-finder — that let residents enter their address and the features they wanted (playground, dog park, walking trail) and get a straightforward list of matching results. The map was removed as an intermediary; residents got their answer directly, but were also given the option of a map after the spatial question was answered.

The outcome

We were recognized by the Center for Digital Government as a pioneering use of GIS on a government website — using geographic data to power a plain-language, task-based tool rather than defaulting to a traditional map interface. Governments around the country soon followed suit, adopting the same map-optional approach to spatial questions on their own sites.

Anthony Willis — the colleague I partnered with on this project, then GIS Supervisor for the City of Las Vegas — and I went on to present this work together at multiple national conferences under the title “GIS: With or Without a Map.”

The long-term impact

What started as a website feature turned out to mark a genuine turning point for the city’s GIS program itself — though the credit for what came after belongs to Anthony and the team he’s led since, not to me. My role was the spark: asking “can GIS do this?”, handing Anthony mockups of how the citizen-facing tool could work, and introducing the usability thinking that reframed the map from product to means-to-an-end. What his team built from there, over the decade-plus since, is their achievement.

According to Anthony, now Enterprise GIS and Programming Manager for the City of Las Vegas, that shift in thinking was the point where the team began moving from a department-scoped, map-centered GIS system toward an enterprise-wide, service-oriented GIS ecosystem: the underlying geographic data — not the map — was the real product, and mapping services became a way to deliver that data wherever it was needed, not just on a map page.

In the years since, under his leadership — well after I’d left the city — that shift compounded into:

• Recognition from their Esri account team as one of the most robust government GIS data engineering programs in the country
• Mapping services integrated across every major ERP system at the city, including address verification used in law enforcement systems
• The city stopped printing maps entirely around 2016, and retired its last two plotters in 2020
• One of the few local government GIS teams in the country — and the only one in the region — running fully on ArcGIS Online’s premium cloud tier, with no on-premise infrastructure
• That same GIS foundation now sits at the center of the city’s AI initiatives

What made this work

This followed the same instinct as the citizen-task redesign: question which convention is actually serving the user versus just being familiar. A map could be the default answer to “how do I show geographic data,” but default answers aren’t always right answers. Recognizing that distinction — and being willing to remove a tool everyone assumed was necessary — is what made this a genuinely different approach rather than a nicer-looking map.