Designing a user interface for exploring relationships between semantically similar brain diseases

Relationship finding is a method that allows researchers to find relationships between concepts in literature. However, the amount of research that is currently available in neuroscience is too much for a single person to review. This poses a problem when one is attempting to find relationships between two concepts which can lead to overlooking crucial relationships. The DatAR project assists researchers in relationship finding between concepts in the neuroscience domain by visualizing linked data in an Augmented Reality (AR) environment. This visualization contains a 3D topic model of brain diseases where the distance between two diseases represents the semantic similarity. In this study, we have designed a visualization that lets neuroscientists explore the relationship between semantically similar brain diseases. We used an iterative design process consisting of three studies. In the first study, we created a user scenario on which we based our first design. After which, we conducted interviews with neuroscientists to find out what information is relevant for users. In the second study, we made two new designs based on the results of the first study. Afterwards, we conducted interviews with design experts to find out what an appropriate way is to visualize the information. The results from these two studies constructed our design requirements. In the last study, we created a final design that satisfies the design requirements and held a usability evaluation with neuroscientists. The results of this evaluation showed that the visualization had few usability problems and users gave the design an average score of 85 on the System Usability Scale. We, therefore, see opportunities to implement this design in AR. We also discuss several fundamental issues with our final design and the implications of designing in 2D for a 3D visualization.