The increasing prevalence of user-generated, or volunteered, geographic information is changing established practices of spatial data production and use in ways that were largely unanticipated in nature or in scope. This paper investigates one dimension of VGI use that has received relatively little attention to date, namely the influence of different cartographic visualisation methods on citizens’ ability to explore and understand VGI. Following a brief review of key challenges related to VGI use, the paper describes a webbased software prototype that was designed to allow users to compare several simple geovisualisation and data filtering techniques for VGI exploration. Next, attention is directed to a specific study context where citizens used the software tool to explore a rich data set of locally-produced VGI related to community assets. The paper concludes with a discussion of the results from this experiment.