Interface Suggestions

[Briliu]

Hi

After watching episode 247 of astronomy cast on youtube I came by to find out just what this moon mappers thing was! I spent a little while doing the man vs machine portion of the moon mappers project and enjoyed it more than I should probably admit

I hope I'm not out of place with giving a couple suggestions as to some improvements on the interface:

1. Move the interface tutorial button to the bottom of the window! (Below the done working button).
   I keep hitting it when flipping between image and hybrid view modes and it reset's the image and I lose all my work!
2. Make the image type buttons toggle buttons. I like to flip back and forth between Image and hybrid quickly when checking the computer placed markers and currently I have to move the mouse back and forth. Not having to do that would be awesome!

That's all that I have found that really bothered me. Mainly because the two of them combined into me clicking tutorial a bunch of times when I didn't mean to.

Also, a heads up, a few times when hitting done working it didn't seem to submit my work (crater total didn't go up) and went straight into the tutorial. Not sure what caused that.

Anyway, looking forward to seeing some neat stuff in the future!

- Justin

[astrostu]

Hi Justin, thanks for coming over and checking us out! It's definitely okay to like the project more than you should admit, but then, you're not admitting you like the project, so we'll just leave it at that.

You are definitely not out of place in suggesting interface changes. We're in what you may call a "public beta" at the moment and trying to figure out what we actually do need to change to make Moon Mappers as easy to use as possible.

[Briliu]

Hi again!

First off I wanted to thank you for taking my suggestion about moving the tutorial button. It's quite a bit better now for my method.

I have a few more little nuances that aren't game breaking but I think they could helpful improvements :

1. After making a circle really small I am unable to move it, I am only able to resize it again. It seems like the "grab" area scaled down to 0 or 1 pixel. This is really only an issue when I'm trying to place a small circle inside a big circle that the computer placed. I don't want to move the computer one because it is correct, but I want to highlight a smaller crater inside the larger one! I am also unable to grab the resize handles of the small circle through the larger circle.
2. When I grab a circle to move it my curser changes to the text highlighting "I-beam" if you know what I mean by that (Example@Uni. Wisconsin Website).. I believe that if it were to remain a pointer it would be easier to know exactly where the circle center is, which is occasionally useful.
3. Along the same lines, the "grab" area of the circle centers the mouse to the circle. This makes accurately highlighting craters that are on the edge of the screen impossible if the crater is less than 50% showing. Although I could see this being intentional on your part as it may not be useful information to have 1/3 of a crater highlighted.

Anyway, Thanks for listening!

- Justin

[astrostu]

Hi Justin, thanks for sending in the suggestions. I've alerted the tech guys to your post, though I'll say that I could not duplicate your first nor second point. What operating system and browser are you using? Also, the circle is supposed to turn red and disappear if you make it below our 18-pixel threshold size.

On point 3, we actually don't want craters that are <50% on the image square you see. Looks like that might've been left out of the interface - so again, I'll forward this on to the tech guys.

[Briliu]

I am using Chrome (latest public release) and Windows 7 (up to date, according to windows update).

However, I just tested the application in IE9 and I do NOT get the "I-beam" cursor (Point #2) when I am dragging circles around. So that appears to be a Chrome issue. I am unsure if it is an issue in firefox as well, though, as I do not have that installed.

I still do get the resize thing in IE. But after playing around with it a bit (in Chrome) I think I know what I am experiencing. If I have the select marker tool chosen and click on the background (not a marker) it unselects any markers. If try to drag around ANY marker at that point, regardless of size, it works fine. However, if I single click on a marker, it highlights/selects it and I am unable to move the marker when they are just above the threshold for being red, it just resizes it. Well, to be more specific, unless I am dead on the center, it will not move, it will only resize.

This only appears to happen for the borderline marker sizes. Large ones do not have an issue unless you click close to the outer edge. This is why I believe it to be something like the relative size of the "resize" border of the circle is just the majority of the circle area for the smaller ones.

So, instructions to recreate sould be as follows:
Create a circle marker that is 1 pixel larger than the threshold for being red.
Choose the select marker tool.
Left click one time and release anywhere on the background (not a circle) to deselect markers.
Left click and release one time in the marker you created above.
Left click and hold anywhere except the exact center of the marker.
Drag the mouse.

It should resize for very small markers, and move medium/large ones.

Maybe it really isn't that big of a deal! lol If you'd like to get to the bottom of this and are unable to repeat it with the instructions, I will see if I can make a quick little video of it happening to me.

[Ansr]

Dev here.
the resize arrow has been redone a couple times since I last pushed something live so it should be simpler now. Fixed the chrome cursor thing(will show up in next version), why Google did that I will never know but whatever I fixed it. And yeah point 3 is intended. the idea being that if the center of a crater isn't on one images its going to be in another, (and it prevents people from hiding craters off screen).

[Briliu]

Sounds great I'm glad to help and I figured point 3 was intentional, just wanted to call it to attention if it wasn't.

I also hope you all don't think I am poo-pooing the interface. I think what you have is intuitive and easy to use!

Is there an ETA on the karma and badges? I have a bit of a compulsion for statistics in games/things lol. It'd be really neat to see how many craters i've marked or how many were accepted/rejected after the fact or something like that. I look forward to seeing what you have in store!

- Justin

[RoySalisbury]

Here is was one thing that I would like to see for us folks with not too good of vision on the small things.

A "blink" type toggle for the currently marked craters in the Man vs Machine. Some craters may be a bit faint and to see if they are marked correctly it would help if you could "blink" off the marking to see whats under it before deleting it (it may actually be correct, just hard to tell).

Perhaps a way to adjust the transparency of the marking might help as well.

Roy

EDIT: Duh! I just found what I was looking for... never mind.

[astrostu]

Here is was one thing that I would like to see for us folks with not too good of vision on the small things.

A "blink" type toggle for the currently marked craters in the Man vs Machine. Some craters may be a bit faint and to see if they are marked correctly it would help if you could "blink" off the marking to see whats under it before deleting it (it may actually be correct, just hard to tell).

Perhaps a way to adjust the transparency of the marking might help as well.

Roy

Hi Roy, thanks for posting. Have you tried the button under "View Mode" (see screenshot)? Does that do what you're asking, or am I not understanding your post? Attachment 2

[RoySalisbury]

Yea.. That was it. I completely missed that. I just found it while looking at more images.

Sorry about that.

[astrostu]

Yea.. That was it. I completely missed that. I just found it while looking at more images. Sorry about that.

Perfectly okay, glad it was a simple "fix."

[Daveorama]

I only have one gripe with the interface, and that is that it is difficult to figure out which craters are too small to mark. Many craters are right on the edge of being big enough, so I end up clicking it, dragging the circle out and then realizing it's probably a bit small.

My suggestion would be to have the cursor show a circular outline of the smallest allowable crater all the time (assuming the crater tool is active). That way as you move the cursor around the map you can easily see if the crater is large enough without even clicking. It would save me a lot of clicking and deleting.

Nice work on the site, it's very enjoyable!

[astrostu]

Alrighty folks, regarding the minimum crater size and crosshairs. I've talked with Pamela (starstryder on here) and she says that usability tests have shown that having even a guide outline of a minimum circle size leads to confusion on what to do. From my point of view, the minimum circle size runs into issues if you start with it and expand it because people don't always know to expand it. Some will just use it as a "cookie cutter" regardless of crater size.

But, we're working on a solution that I think is going to solve the issue without actually using a minimum circle size marker guide. I can't go into details because the details may change, but stay tuned!

[Placidstorm]

Bell's and whistles . Silly sounding things when you click stuff in mappers . Is that to hard for now ? Background music , something you can click to .

[baskerbosse]

Hi,
Would it be possible to get some coordinates for where on the moon you are looking at for each image?

Cheers!
Peter

[astrostu]

Peter - I think we're working on linking up the original NAC strip from where the images come, which have the coordinates. I'm not sure about other plans at the moment. Could you describe a bit more about what you're interested in?

[baskerbosse]

It's just something I thought would be nice to have.
I realised when I spotted the rover, that I had no idea where I was looking at, and that I couldn't see any obvious way of finding out.

Since I never knew there was supposed to be an Apollo site included in the images and with no coordinates I crawled the net for something that looks similar.
Seems like you already have something in the pipeline. -Coordinates would certainly be useful.

I was thinking a lunar map with a dot on it. Or the kind of link in you can see with google maps, but using google moon instead.
At least I thought that might be a good idea until I saw the quality you get with google moon.
Google moon does not seem to be very high res though..
I'm also not sure how widespread the dataset is. The map might end up with the dot always in the same place if the dataset is all from roughly the same area.

Thanks for responding. Eagerly awaiting the next version.

Peter

(By the way, I have a vague memory doing a crater mapping before. Are you aware of any. Was there another internet effort in crater mapping?)

[kmasterdo]

Yes, there was/is Moon Zoo. We had a discussion on the differences between MoonMappers and MoonZoo in the forum some weeks ago.

[CJSF]

[reviving dormant thread]
I'd like to advocate for a crosshairs cursor for the crater marking tool.

Also, regarding image coordinates and such: I noticed when I found the A15 descent stage that I had a terrible time figuring out what it was at first, using Google Moon, because the images we are using seem to be flipped and/or inverted. Is this on purpose?

CJSF

[Ansr]

the cross-hair thing was something I tried that didn't go well (looked bad, made things difficult) so it never went live.