User Experience (UX) of a Big Data Infrastructure

Earth System Grid Federation (ESGF), a well-known e-infrastructure provides open data to study the future anthropogenic climate change. Data are accessed by the research communities to produce sophisticated simulations of the Earth system. This study is based on the survey questionnaire taken by 357 researchers (end-users) who interact with the interfaces provided by ESGF e-infrastructure. Despite the evolution as well as development in the components, applications and user interfaces provided by the e-Science infrastructure, the barriers exist and they limit and delay the research process of scientists while they interact with the e-infrastructure. Hence, the full benefit of the terabytes of data projects hosted by the e-infrastructure is not realized. This study suggests a dire need to do improvements in the e-infrastructure particularly in the human computer interaction (HCI) components such as user interfaces of applications, webpages, ingestion of/access to large volumes of scientific data, collaborative tools, web documentation and others. If these improvements are made the user’s research process using an e-infrastructure will be quadrupled and due to better researchers’ experience using e-infrastructures e-research can thrive. Thus, bringing in timely research results and scientific discoveries.