Visual Perception Enhancement in Sequence Logo
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UNIVERSITI MALAYSIA SARAWAK
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Sequence Logo is a popular graphical representation to visualize the conservation characteristics of biological sequence motifs profile. Previous studies have found that the used of sequence logo as a visual representation to support scientific evidence or arguments could cause misinterpretation by users with different levels of knowledge and experiences and consequently causes biases in decision making. This study is separated into two evaluation studies. The first study is the evaluation of the current design of the Sequence Logo. The aim of the study is to identify the differences in perception and decision making between users with diverse skills and experience level while visualizing Sequence Logo. Whereas the aim of the second study is to evaluate on the improved design of Sequence Logo to identify if the improvement by using different visual attributes will help diverse users in perceiving and interpreting the information to alleviate biases and misinterpretation of the results. In the first evaluation study, an online survey is carried out on a voluntary basis where 52 participants from bioinformatics, genetic or molecular biology background had involved in the survey. Paired sample t-test and independent t-test was used to analyze the results obtained. The result shows that there are significant differences in the perception and needs between novice and expert users while interpreting the results in Sequence Logo. Visual cues and detailed information display are needed by novice users whereas experts prefer a simple but more functional representation in the sequence logo. The second evaluation study involves 55 users with experience in using Sequence Logo. The result shows that the improvement on the colour will help the user in identifying the conservation level of the nucleotide, however, the arrangement and the amount of information present in the improved Sequence Logo causes more attention needed while perceiving the results. Therefore, enhancement on the improved design of the iv Sequence Logo is needed in terms of the colour to represent the non-conserved nucleotide, the arrangement of the nucleotide and the amount of information shown on the graphical representation. Interactivity on the tools is also needed to help both novice and expert user in choosing the most suitable graphical representation for the analysis of result or the representation of result in publication.