Improve Usability of Multidimensional Data Exploration with Water Fountain Based 3D User Interface Metaphor

Big data such as social network data, financial data, and disease data have multiple dimensions that are more complicated to interpret by the human brain. In this regard, the concept of three-dimensional metaphor-based information visualization and navigation has become very important for big data visualization. The three-dimensional visual metaphors can be used to represent information allowing dealing with more abstract data of larger volumes. Therefore new three-dimensional metaphors are needed for the visualization of multidimensional attributes into easily readable and understandable forms. When compared with 2D data representations, 3D brings many advantages in complex data visualization. But most of the existing 3D visualizations result in complex Graphical User Interfaces that require high cognitive efforts to clearly understand these datasets. Therefore this paper presents a novel 3D user interface metaphor for visual analytics of multidimensional data which leads to drawing better conclusions on the datasets. The proposed system represents information in a more realistic 3D setting. The concept of the 3D water fountain metaphor is adopted to implement the novel data exploration mechanism in 3D space. This paper provides an outline of the proposed conceptual design. Employing a Vector-Borne Disease dataset as a case study, a proof-of-concept prototype based on this conceptual design is developed. The applicability of the conceptual metaphor is showcased through two distinct experiments, each involving four groups engaged in decision-making scenarios within the realm of multidimensional data visualization. Key findings reveal that 85% of the data analysis tasks were efficiently completed using the proposed 3D metaphor. Notably, user satisfaction levels including feedback on learnability, interface aesthetics, ease of use, and overall user experience were graded high. These key findings of the evaluation underscore the heightened potential of 3D user interface metaphors for facilitating visual analytics of multidimensional datasets.