Little is known about how end users actually employ metadata to evaluate relevance of geospatial information objects and how this might differ from meeting non-geospatial information needs. While other studies have considered users in related contexts, we could not find any that applied well-established usability techniques to geospatial metadata usage for resolving geographic information needs. Here we discuss a recent usability study where we explored how users determine the relevance or potential value of geospatial information objects from metadata