Showing tips when movies load

Stall Catchers
1

Hi guys,

We are thinking of showing some tips when the movies load. It would be a short text, shown for a few seconds just before the slider can be moved. We don’t know how and when exactly we will be able to do it, but we would like to start gathering your ideas. If we can, we would adapt the tips to players’ level.

  1. As a new player, what tip do you wish you had?
  2. As an advanced player, what tips would you give to new players?
  3. As an advanced player, what tips would you like to see, if any?
2

Hi Claire -
I think tips will be great for beginning players who are just learning the game. However, these should not be forced on the player or require extra time. These should be displayed, but not slow the action of the slider or the movie. Please do not delay the slider while showing the tip. Players can read the tip (maybe just a one liner between the movie and the slider bar) but does not slow the game. A toggle switch should also be available to turn off the display of tips.

Here are a few tips for beginning players.

  1. Which vessel is targeted? Only annotate the targeted vessel.
  2. Quickly look at the entire movie first to locate the targeted vessel .
  3. Look for flow first. If you can clearly see movement in the vessel mark as “Flowing”.
  4. Sometimes you will see flowing dark spots (cells) upstream and/or downstream.
  5. Sometimes the outline algorithm fails and no vessels are targeted. Flag the movie.
  6. Ignore secondary or fringe vessels. They will be targeted in another movie.
  7. Sometimes the outlines are shifted a little. Annotate the best fit targeted vessel.

As an advanced player, I would prefer to turn off the tips. I would welcome periodic announcements as is currently done with upcoming competitions or direct me to look at the Blog and/or Forum for more details.

Thanks,
@gcalkins

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3

Well, I can only second Guy’s excellent response. And, yes, delaying the slider at all would be very annoying for efficient/experienced stallcatchers.
In the event of Guy’s item #5, aside from flagging the movie, the player will still have to call it a stall or flowing. The tip could specify the preferred default. I’ve been assuming “flowing.”
Mike

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4

Great tips !! Thanks ! And good point for the slider. We need to ensure that we will not slow you down !

5

In the near term, another tip would be to help catchers know if they are overdoing either “Stalled” or “Flowing” annotations. The general ratio of all movies to stalled movies is about 8 to 1. Although this could increase or decrease with any given experiment, it might be helpful for catchers to know that this ratio is a good rule of thumb. So if they are marking every other movie as “Stalled”, they might want to reconsider what they are marking as stalled.

Possible Tip:
8. Experience shows approximately 10 out of every 80 movies should be annotated as stalled.

Longer term I could see a feature added to the player statistics box that would show how the player’s stall versus flowing percentages compare with the community. This would help a beginning player calibrate whether they are being too aggressive or not aggressive enough with the number of stalls being detected. Although feedback is currently provided about being correct or incorrect, it doesn’t show if a player is being too biased one way or the other, (I found a similar feature in the Eyewire game to be extremely helpful in the beginning.)

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