A New Diagram for Amino Acids: User Study Comparing Rainbow Boxes to Venn/Euler Diagram

Euler diagrams are commonly used for visualizing small datasets, especially in biology. A well-known example is the diagram of amino acid properties. However, Euler diagrams are not always easy to read for students, and they are complex to produce when the number of sets is above 6. Other approaches exist for set visualization, such as rainbow boxes, but they have not been evaluated properly yet. In this paper, we propose a new diagram for amino acids, using rainbow boxes. We present a crossover user study that compares the new diagram with the usual Euler diagram (often miscalled “Venn diagram”). 78 students in biology were recruited; they responded to questions using the diagrams. We show that rainbow boxes lead to half the error rate (p value = 0.013) and also performed significantly better in terms of response time and user preference. We also explore the possibility of enriching the amino acid diagram with additional information, beyond the 8 properties commonly presented. We discuss the limitations of each technique.