Category Archives: New Features

A New Space for Experimentation with Zooniverse

October 1, 2026 The Zooniverse Leave a comment

Zooniverse is creating a new way for research teams to experiment with tools and approaches that aren’t currently possible within the standard Zooniverse Project Builder. These Custom Front Ends remain connected to Zooniverse infrastructure while giving researchers more flexibility to test new ways for volunteers to take part in research.

Building projects on Zooniverse

Since Galaxy Zoo launched in 2007, the founding of Zooniverse in 2009, and the launch of the Zooniverse DIY Project Builder platform (zooniverse.org/lab) in 2015, Zooniverse has helped hundreds of researchers and millions of volunteers work together to unlock data for research and discovery. The Project Builder provides a shared set of tools that enable research teams to create projects for a broad range of volunteers, data and task types. Every project undergoes extensive testing and review by both the Zooniverse team and our volunteer beta community to help ensure a high-quality experience across supported browsers and devices. We remain committed to supporting and advancing the Zooniverse platform, which is the foundation of Zooniverse and will continue to power the vast majority of projects in the years ahead.

Creating space for experimentation

At the same time, researchers are interested in having space for experimentation: for trying new modes of interaction, for complex projects that integrate machine learning, or just for doing something new that’s not easy to try within the Zooniverse platform. Zooniverse is interested in creating a place to learn about what researchers want and need and what works in practice with volunteers.

Thanks to support from the National Science Foundation, Zooniverse is launching a new initiative that gives research teams that opportunity. We call these projects “Custom Front Ends,” but you can also think of them as experimental projects.

What are Custom Front Ends?

Through this new style of project, research teams are building custom interfaces tailored to their specific research goals. They may include tools and interactions that are not currently available through the standard Zooniverse Project Builder, such as drawing directly on images with a paintbrush, adjusting image contrast on the fly, interactive machine-learning workflows, and more.

Importantly, these projects remain connected to the Zooniverse ecosystem. Custom Front Ends continue to rely on Zooniverse infrastructure and API for services such as volunteer authentication, classification recording, and subject management, while giving researchers greater flexibility to experiment with new approaches.

How are they different from standard Zooniverse projects?

There are, however, some important differences between a Custom Front End and a standard Zooniverse project. Rather than undergoing the full Zooniverse beta test and content review process, Custom Front Ends receive a more limited review focused on ensuring that core functionality is working as expected. This may mean that some of them may encounter difficulties and rough edges beyond what a standard Zooniverse project might experience.

What happens to your data?

Data handling may also differ between projects. Some Custom Front Ends will use the Zooniverse database to store participant-contributed data and will operate under Zooniverse’s standard User Agreement, Privacy Policy, and Security Policy. Others will maintain their own databases and operate under their own Terms & Conditions. Every Custom Front End will clearly explain which approach it uses and include easily accessible links to their policies. We encourage you to review the policies of any external project and consider any potential risks before participation.

Learning through experimentation

By creating more space for experimentation, we hope to learn what new tools, interfaces, and workflows best support both researchers and volunteers. Some ideas may eventually become features of the Zooniverse platform, while others may remain specialized solutions for individual projects. Both outcomes help us better understand how researchers and volunteers can work together to advance research.

What happens next?

In April 2026, we held our first Custom Front End workshop with several research teams interested in developing these experimental project experiences. The first projects are expected to launch this fall, and we’ll continue working with additional teams over the coming years as part of this NSF-funded initiative, and beyond.

As these experimental experiences become available, we will clearly indicate when participation takes place outside the Zooniverse platform. Volunteers will always be able to see when they are leaving zooniverse.org, and every project will clearly present its terms, policies, and data practices to volunteers.

We’re excited to explore what becomes possible when researchers have greater freedom to experiment, and we’re grateful to the volunteers whose participation helps make that innovation possible.

FAQs

What does this mean for me as a volunteer?

Custom Front Ends offer an opportunity to try new task types, tools, and ways of participating in research that aren’t currently available within the Zooniverse platform. Whether or not you choose to participate is entirely up to you.

When one of these external experiences is available, it will be clearly identified on the project’s landing page. You’ll see an announcement banner with information about the experimental workflow and a link to the external site where classification takes place. We will always make it clear when you are leaving the Zooniverse platform and entering a Custom Front End.

Who runs the Custom Front Ends?

Each experimental experience is designed, built, and operated by its own research team. While these projects connect to Zooniverse through our API and infrastructure, they are developed outside the Zooniverse platform. The research team is responsible for the project’s design and operation.

What data will Zooniverse share with Custom Front Ends?

You can choose to sign in to a Custom Front End using your Zooniverse account. If you do, the Custom Front End will have access to your user information (username, email).

Some Custom Front Ends use the Zooniverse database and operate under Zooniverse’s standard policies, linked above. In these cases, any project e-newsletters will be sent by Zooniverse.

Other Custom Front Ends maintain their own databases and operate under their own Terms & Conditions. In those cases, the project team may choose to send e-newsletters directly to you. Refer to the specific Custom Front End project policy for details.

Can I track my Custom Front End classifications in my Zooniverse stats?

Some Custom Front Ends will route classifications through Zooniverse, allowing your contributions and statistics to be tracked through your Zooniverse account. Others will not, and will make this clear to participants.

You will be able to sign in to any Custom Front End using your Zooniverse account (if you choose to do so). If a Custom Front End is configured to submit classifications to the Zooniverse database, your contributions will automatically be linked to your account and reflected in your Zooniverse statistics.

If a Custom Front End does not submit classifications to the Zooniverse database, your contributions will not appear in your Zooniverse statistics, and the project will clearly communicate this before you begin classifying.

What makes a Custom Front End different from a standard Zooniverse project?

Custom Front Ends are designed to give research teams greater freedom to experiment with new interfaces, workflows, and approaches to volunteer participation that aren’t currently possible within the standard Zooniverse Project Builder Platform (zooniverse.org/lab). Unlike projects built using the Project Builder, they do not undergo the full Zooniverse review and volunteer beta-testing process.

Since these projects are experimental by nature, it’s possible that some of them may encounter difficulties and rough edges beyond what a standard Zooniverse project might experience. This is expected – and while it’s part of our learning process, it adds an element of risk that isn’t normally present in standard Zooniverse projects.

Also, as noted above, while some Custom Front Ends will use the Zooniverse database to store participant-contributed data and will operate under Zooniverse’s standard policies linked above, others will maintain their own databases and operate under their own Terms & Conditions. Every Custom Front End will clearly explain which approach it is using and have clear links.

Do I have to participate in Custom Front End experiences?

No. Participation in Custom Front Ends is entirely optional.

Every Custom Front End will be clearly identified, and we’ll always make it clear when you’re leaving the core Zooniverse platform. Each will also clearly indicate whether it operates under Zooniverse’s standard policies (linked above) or under its own Terms & Conditions. If a Custom Front End uses its own policies, it will provide clear access to them. In those cases, any information you provide will be governed by that project’s policies rather than Zooniverse’s. This adds an element of risk that isn’t present in standard Zooniverse projects.

How do I give feedback?

Every Custom Front End project will provide a way for you to share feedback with the team leading the project. Many will include a Talk discussion forum, just like standard Zooniverse projects. Others may use a different feedback mechanism, but they will clearly indicate how you can ask questions, report issues, or share comments.

If you have feedback about Custom Front Ends in general, rather than a specific project, you can contact the Zooniverse platform team in the normal way.

I’m a researcher and I want to build a Custom Front End! How do I start?

We’d love to hear your ideas! Please send an email with “Custom Front End” in the subject line to contact@zooniverse.org. We’ll put you in touch with the team members at Zooniverse who help facilitate these external, experimental experiences.

experimental, New Features, News

Zooniverse and Experiment

September 17, 2025 The Zooniverse Leave a comment

We’re pleased to announce a new kind of partnership, with a group led by old friend and collaborator Mike Walmsley at the University of Toronto. Mike is part of the Galaxy Zoo and Space Warps research teams, among others.

As you know, we take great care in testing any project which appears here on Zooniverse – thanks to expert review and our valuable volunteer panel of beta reviewers — to make sure that it works for a broad range of volunteers and our supported browsers. We believe in this process and remain committed to supporting and advancing the Zooniverse platform and its projects. But sometimes there’s a need for a more experimental approach – for trying out new modes of interaction, for complex projects that integrate machine learning, or just for doing something new. So we’re partnering with Mike’s *Experiment* to provide Zooniverse volunteers with the chance to take part in projects beyond the core Zooniverse platform. Such projects will be run by people we trust, and the goals of any project we link to will be the same as any other Zooniverse project – to provide insight through working with a distributed crowd of volunteers. But it may be that the tech is a little less robust or the projects look less polished than you’re used to. Projects may also come and go much more rapidly than is common in the Zooniverse. Wherever we mention such a project on the Zooniverse site, we’ll clearly tell you that we’re linking to an Experiment Project outside of the Zooniverse platform.

So, welcome Experiment. They have four small projects up already, where you can use a new brush tool to mark features of galaxies from the Euclid space telescope, and there’s more to come. We hope you’ll enjoy this new way of participating in projects.

FAQ

Who built Experiment and who runs and maintains Experiment? Mike Walmsley and his team at the University of Toronto.

What data will Zooniverse share with Experiment? We’re enabling log in with your Zooniverse account. If you choose to use the Zooniverse login this will share only your Zooniverse username and email address with the Experiment project team. You’ll be asked explicitly to approve this before this happens.

Does Experiment share data with the Zooniverse platform? All data submitted via Experiment is outside the Zooniverse platform, is not shared with Zooniverse, and is not subject to the Zooniverse user agreement and privacy policy. You can see the terms of service and privacy policy for Experiment here: Experiment Terms of Service and Privacy Policy

Can I track my classifications? Because data is stored outside the Zooniverse platform, participation in Experiment projects is not captured in Zooniverse’s database and will not be included in your Zooniverse stats.

How do I give feedback? For these initial Experiment projects, please share your thoughts on the Talk pages for Galaxy Zoo and Stellar Streams, and the researchers leading each Experiment project will respond. For anything else, you’re always welcome to get in touch with the Zooniverse team: contact@zooniverse.org.

CitizenScience, Education, New Features, News

An Educator’s Guide To Our Group Engagement Tools

October 4, 2024 The Zooniverse 1 Comment

Over the years, one of the most common requests from educators has been for tools to support group engagement in Zooniverse and better tell your story of collective impact. We’re so grateful for a grant from NASA enabling us to build these new tools to meet those needs.

Whether you’re a library or museum educator, a camp counselor, or a classroom teacher, read on to discover how Zooniverse can enhance your educational goals.

Zooniverse is the world’s largest platform for people-powered research, with millions of participants and dozens of active projects across various disciplines. By using Zooniverse, you join a global network of educators offering students often their first opportunity to engage in real research. From classifying galaxies and tagging penguins to transcribing historic documents and marking the structure of cells for cancer research, Zooniverse projects span a wide array of research fields.

For a list of curricular resources for educators, including lesson plans, instructor guides, and more, check out zooniverse.org/get-involved/education.

Tracking Individual and Collective Impact

Zooniverse offers easy ways to track both individual and collective impact, making it easy to use in educational settings. You can assign tasks, motivate participation, set up friendly competitions between classes, and more.

Personal Stats

When logged into Zooniverse, each individual sees their own stats, including classification counts and hours spent. A valuable feature for fulfilling service hour requirements is the ability to generate a signed volunteer certificate.

Group Stats

Groups in Zooniverse can view their collective impact, set shared goals, and celebrate milestones. These tools empower educators to engage students in new ways.

Step 1: Create Your Group

Go to zooniverse.org, sign in, and scroll down to ‘My Groups’. Click ‘Create New Group.’ Name your group appropriately, such as “Hammond’s 4th Period Biology” or “Davis County Public Library.”

As the admin, you can decide if the group stats page will be publicly viewable or only accessible to group members. Additionally, you can choose whether to display individual stats or only aggregate results. For example, if your group stats page is public, you can set it so that only you can see individual stats, or you can allow other group members or everyone to see them. Through the admin pop-up, you can update your group settings or remove group members at any time.

For additional Group details/features, see this blog post.

Step 2: Invite Participants to Join Your Group

Have your students or program participants create a Zooniverse account by clicking ‘Register’ in the upper-right corner of zooniverse.org. To invite them to join your group, click the ‘Copy Join Link’ on your group’s page and share it via email or other preferred means, such as creating a QR code.

Once they click the join link, all classifications they do on any Zooniverse project will be included in your group stats page, contributing to your group’s collective impact.

Step 3: View/Share Your Group Stats

When viewing your group stats page, you can use the drop-down options on the upper-right of the stats bar chart to filter to a specific time period and/or project of interest. Another helpful feature is the ‘See detailed stats’ option, where you can view all group contributors’ stats and generate a .CSV file for further analysis. A future feature will be the ability to filter to specific time periods within this detailed stats page.

Members of your group will also be able to view the group stats page. Depending on the choices you’ve made in the admin settings, group members will either be able to only view the aggregate stats OR they’ll be able to view both the aggregate and individual stats.

If you’ve set your group visibility settings to ‘public’, you’ll have the ‘Share Group’ option at the top of your group’s stats page. Clicking ‘Share group’ will copy a link to the public-facing view of your group’s stats page. This is different from a ‘Join Link’. Anyone with the ‘Share Group’ link will simply be able to view the group’s stats, but will not be added as a member of the group.

Celebrating Milestones

A few Zooniverse project teams have created short thank you videos, which are great rewards to share with your students after reaching a collective milestone.

Example: STEM Club at a Public Library

Imagine you lead a STEM club at your local public library. You create a group, set the settings to public but only for aggregate results (i.e, not showing individual stats publicly), copy the join link, and share it with your group members. You set a classification challenge for the week, share recommended projects (see zooniverse.org/projects for the full list), and encourage free choice. Throughout the week, you update your group on progress toward your goal. At your next meeting, you celebrate reaching the goal with a thank you video and highlight top contributors with special rewards. Then, you set the next week’s challenge to keep the momentum going.

Other Use Cases

Friendly competition among class periods
Extra credit opportunities for your students
Extension activity after a museum field trip experience
Summer camp group tracking independent research time

Share your Stories of Impact with Us

We’d love to hear about your experience and share your stories of impact with the broader Zooniverse community to spark ideas and inspiration in others. See this Daily Zooniverse post as an example. Email us at contact@zooniverse.org with your stories!

Get in Touch

If you have questions or need advice, join the conversation in our dedicated Talk discussion forum around Education and the Zooniverse or email us at contact@zooniverse.org.

On behalf of Zooniverse, we are incredibly grateful that you choose to use participatory science in your educational programs and hope to continue fostering this innovative community of educators around the world.

Thank you for including Zooniverse in your educational efforts!

New Features, News, Statistics, Zoo Planning

Freshening up the Zooniverse Homepage

September 10, 2024 The Zooniverse Leave a comment

The Zooniverse has come a long way since beginning our journey together in 2009 – from the launch of the Project Builder to supporting diverse task types across the disciplines, including transcription, tagging, and marking. This fall, we’re continuing our frontend codebase migration and design evolution with a fresh, modern redesign to some of our main pages – this update focuses on freshening up our homepage.

What’s New?

Your Stats: Now, you can more easily track your progress and goals. See all your classification stats on one page and filter by project or time frame.
Volunteer Recognition: We heard you! Create personalized volunteer certificates right on the homepage. Perfect for students needing proof of volunteer hours!
Group Engagement: Create your group, set up goals and see the impact you’re making together. Great for families, teams, classrooms, or friends working on projects together.
Easy Navigation: Click the Zooniverse logo in the upper-left corner of any page to return to your homepage easily.

Read on for more details.

The zooniverse.org homepage serves a broad audience of new and returning volunteers, educators, and researchers. We believe the homepage should be a central hub where these different audiences can find the tools they need to make their Zooniverse experience satisfying and worthwhile. Now you’ll be able to pick up where you left off classifying, see your stats at a glance, and follow up on your last classifications to add them to a collection, favorite, or comment.

A common request over the years has been better tools for capturing individual and group impact. Thanks to support from NASA, we’ve been working hard to implement improved personal stats and new features that allow you to see the collective impact of your groups – whether you’re a family, a corporate team, a classroom, or simply a group of friends passionate about participating in projects together. We’ve made significant strides in bringing these functionalities to life.

Key features of your new homepage:

Personalized Statistics: We’re making it a little easier to keep track of your progress and goals. Now all of your real-time classification stats can be found on one page and you can filter by project or by a specific time frame. Access detailed information about your contributions, including the number of classifications, projects you’ve worked on, and your impact over time.

A foundational step in this effort was a complete overhaul of our stats infrastructure to ensure greater reliability and stability. Moving forward, zooniverse.org personal stats will pull data exclusively from our updated stats server, reflecting contributions from 2007 onwards.

Volunteer Recognition: Generate personalized volunteer certificates right from your Zooniverse homepage! Customizable to specific time periods and projects. An often requested feature for students fulfilling volunteer service hour requirements.

Group Engagement: A new way to create and share group goals and tell the story of your collective impact. Read this blog post for more details.

Streamlined Navigation: Enjoy an easier flow by clicking the Zooniverse logo in the upper-left on any page to return to your homepage.

We value your feedback! We launched the new homepage in September of 2024. If you encounter any difficulties or have questions as you’re using the new homepage, please share them in this Talk thread and mention @support.

experimental, New Features, News, Technical

Introducing: the Community Catalog

August 14, 2024 Sam Blickhan Leave a comment

The Community Catalog (https://community-catalog.zooniverse.org) is a custom tool to offer Zooniverse project participants the opportunity to explore a project dataset, and to allow our team to experiment with creating new pathways into classifying.

We wanted to create a digital space that would facilitate not only sharing, but also discovery of participants’ contributions alongside institutional information (i.e. metadata) about the subjects being classified. The result was a data exploration app connected to specific Zooniverse crowdsourcing projects (How Did We Get Here? and Stereovision) that allows users to search and explore each project’s photo dataset based on participant-generated hashtags as well as the institutional metadata provided by project teams.

The Home Page of the *Stereovision* project in the Community Catalog.

The app includes a home page (shown above) with search/browsing capabilities, as well as an individual page for each photograph included in the project. The subject page (shown below) displays any available institutional metadata, participant-generated hashtags, and Talk comments. A ‘Classify this subject’ button allows users exploring the data to go directly to the Zooniverse project and participate in whatever type of data collection is taking place (transcription, labeling, generating descriptive text, etc.).

The Subject Page of the Community Catalog, displaying a subject with multiple Talk comments and community-generated hashtags.

Combined with the Talk (and QuickTalk) features, we’re hoping that this tool will encourage participants to share their experiences, memories, questions, and thoughts about the project photos, the historical events depicted, and the importance of the collection. The Community Catalog offers an approach where a participant can allow their interest in a specific item to lead them to take part in a classification task, rather than classification to Talk being a one-way street.

How Did We Get Here? was the pilot project for the Community Catalog, and is now complete. We have just launched the second project to use the Catalog, Stereovision, which you can participate in either via the Community Catalog site, or by visiting the Zooniverse project here: Stereovision.

The Community Catalog is not available for re-use by other projects in this exact form (i.e. as a standalone app), but we’re planning to incorporate some of its features into the Talk section of the Zooniverse platform in 2025. If you have any questions or would like to share your thoughts about this app, please feel free to reply to this post, or email us at contact@zooniverse.org.

The Community Catalog was developed as part of the AHRC-funded project Communities and Crowds. This project is run in collaboration with volunteer researchers and staff at the National Science and Media Museum in Bradford, United Kingdom, and National Museums Scotland, as well as with the Zooniverse teams at Oxford University and the Adler Planetarium in Chicago.

New Features, Technical

Navigating the Future: Zooniverse’s Frontend Codebase Migration and Design Evolution

April 23, 2024 The Zooniverse

Dear Zooniverse Community,

We’re pleased to update you on an important development as we undergo a migration to a new frontend codebase over the course of 2024-2025. This transition brings a fresh and improved experience to our platform.

From a participant’s perspective, the primary changes involve project layout and styling, resulting in a more user-friendly interface. Importantly, these updates don’t impact your stats (e.g,. classification count), Collections, Favorites, etc.

To offer you a sneak peek, check out the updated design and layout on projects that have already migrated, such as:

If a project has a design similar to the examples above, it has migrated. Conversely, if it resembles the old design, like the Milky Way Project, it hasn’t migrated yet.

We value your feedback! If you encounter any difficulties or have suggestions as you’re participating in a project, please share them in the respective project’s Talk or within this general Announcements Talk thread and mention @support.

Wondering about the motivation behind this change? We built the new frontend codebase in order to ensure the robustness and stability of the Zooniverse platform, with key updates enhancing code maintenance, accessibility, and overall sustainability.

Here’s a breakdown of some of the improvements:

Breaking up the Code: We’ve modularized our code into independent, reusable libraries to enhance maintenance and overall sustainability.
Next.js for Server Side Rendering: By utilizing Next.js, we’re improving accessibility for participants worldwide, particularly those with lower internet speeds and bandwidth.
Classify Page Code Updates: We’ve refined elements such as workflows and the subject viewer to ensure improved robustness and sustainability of our codebase.
Authentication Library Updates: Keeping up with the latest standards, we’ve updated our authentication libraries to enhance security and user experience.
Integrated Code Testing: To maintain the long-term health of our technical products, we’ve integrated code testing throughout our development process. This mitigates against updates introducing bugs or other issues into the codebase, adhering to standard practices.

Thank you for being part of the Zooniverse community! Looking forward to many more groundbreaking discoveries and advances in research. Your classifications and participation in Talk make all of this possible. Thank you!

Warm regards,

Laura Trouille, Zooniverse PI

New Features, News

Zooniverse New Functionality: Organizations

June 19, 2019 The Zooniverse Leave a comment

We recently deployed new functionality on the Zooniverse platform supporting ‘Organizations’; the ability to have a single landing page for multiple projects.

Screen Shot 2019-06-13 at 3.56.42 PM

The above screenshot of the Snapshot Safari Organization illustrates the look and feel of an Organization landing page. The page provides a brief overview, information about the team leading the effort, and quick access to the 8+ related projects (e.g., Snapshot Serengeti, Snapshot De Hoop, etc.). The page also displays a few aggregated statistics across the projects: total number of projects within the Organization, total number of subjects, total number of classifications, and the total number of completed subjects. In 2020 we’ll provide a page linked to each Organization with more complete listing of its projects’ statistics, mirroring the information available through each individual project’s statistics page (e.g., https://www.zooniverse.org/projects/shuebner729/snapshot-de-hoop/stats).

Screen Shot 2019-06-13 at 3.59.42 PM

The above screenshot of the Notes from Nature Organization landing page illustrates an additional ‘filter’ functionality that some Organizations will find useful. By clicking on the ‘Plants’, ‘Bug’, etc. buttons, you can filter down to just projects tagged with those keywords.

Screen Shot 2019-06-13 at 4.03.01 PM

https://lab.zooniverse.org provides access to the editor interface for building Projects and building Organizations.

Screen Shot 2019-06-13 at 4.06.21 PM

Within the Organization Editor Interface, the Organization owner and their collaborators can upload text and image content and link Projects to their Organization.

Which projects can be linked into an Organization?

You can only link projects for which you’re an owner or collaborator.
Only ‘launch approved’ projects will appear in the public view of your Organization landing page.
When linking a project to your Organization, the interface indicates whether that project is ‘launch approved’ or not.
As an Organization owner or collaborator, you can link a project to your Organization that isn’t yet launch approved and you can see how that project will look in your Organization landing page. By clicking on ‘volunteer’ view, you will then see only the ‘launch approved’ projects (i.e., the public view). This was put in place as a way for owners and collaborators to ‘preview’ a new project under development within a live Organizing landing page.

Once you are ready for your Organization landing page to be a publicly accessible URL, send an email to contact@zooniverse.org for the Zooniverse team to review and list it as public. We have slated development time in 2020 to add a new component within https://www.zooniverse.org/projects/ listing all live Organizations.

If you have questions about setting up an Organization, please post within the ‘Building an Organization’ thread within the ‘Project Building’ Discussion Forum (https://www.zooniverse.org/talk/18).

CitizenScience, New Features, News

Beta for Mobile

November 5, 2018 Noah Malmed 1 Comment

One of the big efforts for the mobile app right now is to make the project building experience for mobile feel about the same as it does for web. For the most part, the experiences were very similar. In fact, they were almost identical besides the limitations we put on what workflows mobile projects can have. There was, however, a very large limiting factor for mobile project builders. There was no formal path from creating a project to getting that project to release on the app.

Introducing Beta Mode for mobile!

Now project builders who want their workflows to be enabled on mobile can have them reviewed on mobile as well. Here’s how it works:

When a project that has a mobile workflow is approved to go to beta, it will appear in the “Beta Review” section on the main page of the app.

From there, users will be able to view and test all of the beta projects that are currently live.

We are launching this feature with (of course) Galaxy Zoo Mobile. It is available now for all our users, so go ahead and check it out!

Like beta review on web-based projects, we will collect feedback from volunteer testers and give that back to project owners. This new process will lead to better, clearer mobile workflows in the future.

Stay tuned for more notes about upcoming mobile features!

Download our iOS and Android apps!

CitizenScience, New Features, News, Statistics, Technical

Zooniverse Data Aggregation

October 26, 2018 The Zooniverse Leave a comment

Hi all, I am Coleman Krawczyk and for the past year I have been working on tools to help Zooniverse research teams work with their data exports. The current version of the code (v1.3.0) supports data aggregation for nearly all the project builder task types, and support will be added for the remaining task types in the coming months.

What does this code do?

This code provides tools to allow research teams to process and aggregate classifications made on their project, or in other words, this code calculates the consensus answer for a given subject based on the volunteer classifications.

The code is written in python, but it can be run completely using three command line scripts (no python knowledge needed) and a project’s data exports.

Configuration

The first script is the uses a project’s workflow data export to auto-configure what extractors and reducers (see below) should be run for each task in the workflow. This produces a series of `yaml` configuration files with reasonable default values selected.

Extraction

Next the extraction script takes the classification data export and flattens it into a series of `csv` files, one for each unique task type, that only contain the data needed for the reduction process. Although the code tries its best to produce completely “flat” data tables, this is not always possible, so more complex tasks (e.g. drawing tasks) have structured data for some columns.

Reduction

The final script takes the results of the data extraction and combine them into a single consensus result for each subject and each task (e.g. vote counts, clustered shapes, etc…). For more complex tasks (e.g. drawing tasks) the reducer’s configuration file accepts parameters to help tune the aggregation algorithms to best work with the data at hand.

A full example using these scripts can be found in the documentation.

Future for this code

At the moment this code is provided in its “offline” form, but we testing ways for this aggregation to be run “live” on a Zooniverse project. When that system is finished a research team will be able to enter their configuration parameters directly in the project builder, a server will run the aggregation code, and the extracted or reduced `csv` files will be made available for download.

CitizenScience, New Features, News, Statistics

What’s going on with the classify interface? Part three

June 11, 2018 beckyrother Leave a comment

Part three in a multi-part series exploring the visual and UX changes to the Zooniverse classify interface

Coming soon!

Today we’ll be going over a couple of visual changes to familiar elements of the classify interface and new additions we’re excited to premier. These updates haven’t been implemented yet, so nothing is set in stone. Please use this survey to send me feedback about these or any of the other updates to the Zooniverse.

New modals

Many respondents to my 2017 design survey requested that they be able to use the keyboard to make classifications rather than having to click so many buttons. One volunteer actually called the classifier “a carpal-tunnel torturing device”. As a designer, that’s hard to hear – it’s never the goal to actively injure our volunteers.

We actually do support keyboard shortcuts! This survey helped us realize that we need to be better at sharing some of the tools our developers have built. The image above shows a newly designed Keyboard Shortcut information modal. This modal (or “popup”) is a great example of a few of the modals we’re building – you can leave it open and drag it around the interface while you work, so you’ll be able to quickly refer to it whenever you need.

This behavior will be mirrored in a few of the modals that are currently available to you:

Add to Favorites
Add to Collection / Create a New Collection
Subject Metadata
“Need Help?”

It will also be applied to a few new ones, including…

Field Guide

Another major finding from the design survey was that users did not have a clear idea where to go when they needed help with a task (see chart below).

We know research teams often put a lot of effort into their help texts, and we wanted to be sure that work was reaching the largest possible audience. Hence, we moved the Field Guide from a small button on the right-hand side of the screen – a place that can become obscured by the browser’s scrollbar – and created a larger, more prominent button in the updated toolbar:

By placing the Field Guide button in a more prominent position and allowing the modal to stay open during classifications, we hope this tool will be taken advantage of more than it currently is.

The layout was the result of the audit of every live project I conducted in spring 2017:

Field Guide
Mode item count	5	Mode label word count	2
Min item count	2	Min label word count	2
Max items count	45	Max label word count	765

Using the mode gave me the basis on which to design; however, there’s quite a disparity between min and max amounts. Because of this disparity, we’ll be giving project owners with currently active projects a lot of warning before switching to the new layout, and they’ll have the option to continue to use the current Field Guide design if they’d prefer.

Tutorial

Another major resource Zooniverse offers its research teams and volunteers is the Tutorial. Often used to explain project goals, welcome new volunteers to the project, and point out what to look for in an image, the current tutorial is often a challenge because its absolute positioning on top of the subject image.

No more!

In this iteration of the classify interface, the tutorial opens once as a modal, just as it does now, and then lives in a tab in the task area where it’s much more easily accessible. You’ll be able to switch to the Tutorial tab in order to compare the example images and information with the subject image you’re looking at, rather than opening and closing the tutorial box many times.

A brand-new statistics section

Another major comment from the survey was that volunteers wanted more ways to interact with the Zooniverse. Thus, you’ll be able to scroll down to find a brand-new section! Features we’re adding will include:

Your previous classifications with Add to Favorites or Add to Collection buttons
Interesting stats, like the amount of classifications you’ve done and the amount of classifications your community have done
Links to similar projects you might be interested in
Links to the project’s blog and social media to help you feel more connected to the research team
Links to the project’s Talk boards, for a similar purpose
Possibly: A way to indicate that you’re finished for the day, giving you the option to share your experience on social media or find another project you’re interested in.

The statistics we chose were directly related to the responses from the survey:

Respondents were able to choose more than one response; when asked to rank them in order of importance, project-wide statistics were chosen hands-down:

Project-wide statistics are the most important

We also heard that volunteers sometimes felt disconnected from research teams and the project’s accomplishments:

“In general there is too less information about the achievement of completed projects. Even simple facts could cause a bit of a success-feeling… how many pictures in this project over all have been classified? How much time did it take? How many hours were invested by all participating citizens? Were there any surprising things for the scientists? Things like that could be reported long before the task of a project is completely fullfilled.”

Research teams often spend hours engaged in dialog with volunteers on Talk, but not everyone who volunteers on Zooniverse is aware or active on Talk. Adding a module on the classify page showing recent Talk posts will bring more awareness to this amazing resource and hopefully encourage more engagement from volunteers.

Templates for different image sizes and dimensions

When the project builder was created, we couldn’t have predicted the variety of disparate topics that would become Zooniverse projects. Originally, the subject viewer was designed for one common image size, roughly 2×3, and other sizes have since been shoehorned in to fit as well as they can.

Now, we’d like to make it easier for subjects with extreme dimensions, multimedia subjects, and multi-image subjects to fit better within the project builder. By specifically designing templates and allowing project owners to choose the one that best fits their subjects, volunteers and project owners alike will have a better experience.

Very wide subjects will see their toolbar moved to the bottom of the image rather than on the right, to give the image as much horizontal space as possible. Tall subjects will be about the same width as they have been, but the task/tutorial box will stay fixed on the screen as the image scrolls, eliminating the need to scroll up and down as often when looking at the bottom of the subject.

Let’s get started!

I’m so excited for the opportunity to share a preview of these changes with you. Zooniverse is a collaborative project, so if there’s anything you’d like us to address as we implement this update, please use this survey to share your thoughts and suggestions. Since we’re rolling these out in pieces, it will be much easier for us to be able to iterate, test, and make changes.

We estimate that the updates will be mostly in place by early 2019, so there’s plenty of time to make sure we’re creating the best possible experience for everyone.

Thank you so much for your patience and understanding as we move forward. In the future, we’ll be as open and transparent as possible about this process.