My wife got her 23andMe personal genetics profile information yesterday. Wow, you never really know a person until you see her genome, huh? Just kidding, Rosemary. The results raised her eyebrows and mine after we dug a little into the information.
First, the good: The amount of information that is elegantly packaged into one service module is amazing. Learning not only about geographic origins and eye color, 23andMe makes it easy to find out who your genome resembles most. No matter how simple some of the charts look, building software to produce that output is extremely difficult.
Now, the challenges: With so much data, it was hard to find the same information twice. Once Rosemary viewed her profile and a few pages, she found it hard to locate the same information again when trying to share it with me. Navigation could be improved. Lastly, a couple of the charts weren't so easy to understand (and I have a pretty good feel for data visualizations). There were instructions on how to read these charts, however, which shows insight among the 23andMe team that their visualizations may be new ways for people to view data.
Although this isn't supposed to be a review, 23andMe is quite a service. The information is thorough and relatively easy to digest. Rosemary and I now have a few private jokes based on the results of her data that will last quite a long time. She now wants me to send in my kit. I think I'll milk this just a little longer. Like I said, you never know someone.....
0 comments:
Post a Comment