3D gadgets for business process visualization—a case study

Business visualization is becoming increasingly important, since managers recognize the power of human visual intuition in information-rich decision tasks. Nevertheless, despite its promises, 3D visualizations are far less common than one would expect. In this paper, we describe a case study where we took a 2D visualization of a business process as a starting point, for which we subsequently provided a 3D visualization. We introduce a small collection of 3D visualization gadgets and associated behaviors, implemented in Java3D, which proved to be relatively complete for our case. For each of these gadgets and behaviors, we will discuss requirements and design trade-offs. The case study, which concerns an actual business process of the largest social security provider in the Netherlands, illustrates the usability of our gadgets and their associated behaviors, which include brushing, grouping, and (drill down) manipulation.