Variation Viewer – visualizing disease-causing human proteins
2016-2018 | data visualization | product design | proteomics
A capstone project that turned into a novel approach to visualizing protein mutation data.
“Variation Viewer” visually explores disease-causing changes in proteins with a focus on user experience, human factors, and information design.
menu_book This project has a peer-reviewed publication!
What is Variation Viewer?
Variation Viewer started as a capstone project during my undergrad in collaboration with designer Verónica Alfaro. We wanted to redesign data visualizations for proteomic data (genetic information of proteins). We originally focused our work on breast cancer-related proteins because it's one of the most deadly cancers and its research is alive and thriving.
In spite of the lack of funding for this project, we continued developing it and over time were able to expand its use to any protein data available within the Ensembl genome database. Ensembl is one of the gold standard sources of vertebrate genetic information.
Variation Viewer took a dated, hard to understand visualization that used a lot of small symbols and transformed it into a dynamic node-link visualization that immediately provided insights to users, such as which types of mutations were more common for a given protein.
Conceptual Work
Below you can see some curated explorations we did before settling on the horizontal node-link diagram. Circular representations of genomic data are a common mental model because of a very successful project called Circos However, through usability testing we determined that for researchers the system was easier to navigate and tasks were easier to accomplish using a horizontal layout.
Final Solution
The final solution, which also awarded us a publication in Oxford Bioinformatics is a dynamic, interactive workbench to explore, hypothesize, and export mutation data of interest for any protein in the Ensembl database.
While the project is no longer in active development, Variation Viewer laid a lot of the foundations about how I approach design, how I work with domain-experts and how I think about the impact my work has. For more thoughts on my design approach, you can check out this project.
Credits
Research, Data Visualization, UI & UX Design: Antonio Solano and Verónica Alfaro | Data architecture and web implementation: Carlos Cruz. Special thanks to Luis Ruíz. Advisors (for original capstone project): Franklin Hernández-Castro and Allan Orozco.