Letting Things Slide: A New Trial Interface for Expressing Uncertainty

“How many spiral arms are in the image – is it two or three? Is that a disk viewed edge-on? I think so, but I’m not quite sure…” If you’ve interacted with Galaxy Zoo before, you may have asked yourself questions like these. Real galaxy images can be confusing. You may be uncertain! 

Until now, you have always had to make a choice. There was no way to express uncertainty in your annotations. But now there is! Try it here.

We are trialing a new experimental interface that lets you express your confidence in your annotations by dragging on a slider. This design is motivated by recent research indicating that we may be able to learn more, faster, by collecting annotator uncertainty [see this paper, this paper, this paper, this paper]. Allowing you to express your uncertainty by dragging a slider means that you – Zooniverse Friend – are providing more information with each click.  

We believe this slider design might help us – through your support – discover more about galaxies, faster! 

This is the second trial project we’re starting, adding to the Tags trial that Hayley introduced earlier on the blog. The big picture here is that we’re trying to think about how Galaxy Zoo could evolve in the coming years. As with any science project, we need to gather data and test our ideas. 

Join in here and help us improve Galaxy Zoo.

We’ll run this trial for a short time – perhaps a couple of months – to gather your annotations and feedback. You can still use the current Galaxy Zoo that you know and (hopefully) love, at www.galaxyzoo.org.

Thank you for helping us,

Mike, Katie, and Ilia.