Rainbow boxes displaying the properties of amino acids

A rainbow box is a

data visualization Data and information visualization (data viz or info viz) is an interdisciplinary field that deals with the graphic representation of data and information. It is a particularly efficient way of communicating when the data or information is num ...

technique for overlapping sets. Rainbow boxes are an alternative to

Euler Leonhard Euler ( , ; 15 April 170718 September 1783) was a Swiss mathematician, physicist, astronomer, geographer, logician and engineer who founded the studies of graph theory and topology and made pioneering and influential discoveries in ma ...

and Venn diagrams. The figure on the right shows rainbow boxes displaying the properties of

amino acids Amino acids are organic compounds that contain both amino and carboxylic acid functional groups. Although hundreds of amino acids exist in nature, by far the most important are the alpha-amino acids, which comprise proteins. Only 22 alpha am ...

. In rainbow boxes, the elements are shown in columns (e.g. the amino acids), and each set is represented by a rectangular box (e.g. the groups of amino acids sharing a given property). Each box covers the columns corresponding to the elements belonging to its set. When the elements of a given set are not displayed in contiguous columns, a “holes” is present in the box of the set (in the amino acids example on the right, the "Polar" box has three holes). The column order is computed using a heuristic optimization algorithm, in order to minimize the number of holes. A specific color is associated with each column, ranging across the spectrum, and box colors are the mean of the colors of the columns it covers. Boxes are stacked vertically, the largest boxes being at the bottom. Custom colors may also be defined, depending on the data. Rainbow boxes were initially presented at the International Conference Information Visualisation (iV) in 2016, and then published in 2017 the ''Journal of Visual Language and Computing''. A

user study Usability testing is a technique used in user-centered design, user-centered interaction design to evaluate a product by testing it on users. This can be seen as an irreplaceable usability practice, since it gives direct input on how real users use ...

involving 78 students in biology compared rainbow boxes to Euler diagram for the visualization of amino acids properties. Results showed that rainbow boxes lead to significantly fewer errors and lower response times. A majority of students also preferred rainbow boxes.

References

{{reflist Visualization (graphics) Diagrams