Towards enhancing the user experience of ChIP-Seq data analysis web tools

Abstract

Deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) sequencing is the process of locating the sequence of the main chemical bases in the DNA. Next-generation sequencing (NGS) is the state-of-the-art DNA sequencing technique. The NGS technique advanced the biological science in analyzing human DNA due to its scalability, high throughput, and speed. Analyzing human DNA is crucial to determine the ability of a person to develop certain diseases and his ability to respond to certain medications. ChIP-sequencing is a method that combines chromatin immunoprecipitation (ChIP) with NGS sequencing to analyze protein interactions with DNA to identify binding sites. Many online web tools have been developed to conduct ChIP-Seq data analysis to either discover or find motifs, i.e., patterns of binding sites. Since these ChIP-Seq web tools need to be used by clinical practitioners, they must comply to the web-related usability tasks including effectiveness, efficiency and satisfaction to enhance the user experience (UX). To that end, we have conducted an empirical study to understand their UX design. Specifically, we have evaluated the usability of 8 widely used ChIP-Seq web tools against 6 known usability quality metrics. Our study shows that the design of the studied ChIP-Seq web tools does not follow the UX design principles.