Asteroid Zoo Talk

Improvements to the User Interface?

  • rbnerfjr by rbnerfjr

    I am a retired physicist, with a long-standing belief that impedance-matching scientific data to the inherent skills in human perception and coordination is far better than fine-tuning clever algorithms. I’d like to help analyzing Zooniverse data, but I keep running into impedance mismatches between your data and my mind.

    Here are my reactions from a first try at the Asteroid Zoo interface using Safari 7.0.5 on Mac OSX 10.9.4:

    • The cursor does not always change with the picking mode, so I was initially confused whether to click on the image and then on the sidebar, or click on the sidebar and then on the image.

    • I really need some sort of “bread-crumb” to mark the general location of an asteroid I spot in color-cycle display, because I lose the asteroid when I have to divert my visual attention to go click on the sidebar to set up the asteroid-picking mode. BTW: love the color-cycle display.

    • If I miss a known asteroid, I want to be able to go back to the identical display and understand why I didn’t see it. Just telling me I missed something within a green circle on a differently-scaled view doesn’t allow me to improve. It actually tends to discourage me.

    • When these frustrations built up and I clicked on “Talk” after finishing picking an image sequence, it took me to a page with no active fields, except for the astronomical image, at yet a third size, but with no color-cycle mode. (The login fields aren’t tempting because I have sampled several citizen-science websites, and I don’t want to get involved in looking them up and seeing whether any login I created there works here.) In attempting to abandon the “Talk” line, I wind up back to the tutorial sequence, apparently active on an image with no asteroids.

    Posted

  • planetaryscience by planetaryscience

    This project is new, and there is obviously a lot to improve. Unfortunately for the both of you, there aren't many scientists or technical managers that are active enough to do a revamp as you inquire for. However, I do support these concerns and suggestions.

    Posted

  • CTidwell3 by CTidwell3

    It's similar to how when I opened the separate thread on the hashtag errors I have seen, that i mentioned that it may be a while to fix due to the bug being in this part of the interface. This talk functionality is sorta the 'out of the box' zooniverse discussion board/recent/object chat/collections template that is available and used by many of the different zooniverse projects. Compare these pages for example:

    http://talk.asteroidzoo.org/#/subjects/AAZ0001jen

    http://talk.notesfromnature.org/#/subjects/ANN00019du

    http://talk.snapshotserengeti.org/#/subjects/ASG00135qz

    You can see much of the functionality is the same, with just minor differences. Overtime I agree it would make sense to add many of these suggestions, but its just a matter of the sceince team having the resources that can implement them.

    Posted

  • dudrea by dudrea

    Should be possible to get the windows "more popular hashtag" before writing a comment. It would facilitate the choice of a good orthograph. And avoid multiple like #badimage, #bad-image and #bad_image no speaking off #bad

    Posted

  • CTidwell3 by CTidwell3

    Yeah, that would be a great feature. I know in past zooniverse projects, I either kept a document file with the hashtags commonly used, or opened a separate window to the 'recent' page where I could see the hashtags being used when I could not remember.

    Posted

  • rbnerfjr by rbnerfjr

    Thanks for your response. I'm glad that my problems were real and not simply a failure to properly RTFM;-)

    Posted