Look into MapSwipe

[Daniel-Mietchen]

Came up multiple times at the HOT Summit (cf. https://github.com/Daniel-Mietchen/events/issues/71 ):

• http://mapswipe.org/
• https://twitter.com/hashtag/mapswipe

[Daniel-Mietchen]

See also https://twitter.com/hotosm/status/909589095709659136 .

[Daniel-Mietchen]

More from Twitter:

Now would be the time, we have a window of hours before landslide identification starts and the exposure data is key.

OK, installing it now.

[Daniel-Mietchen]

In the first tweet listed above, they speak of 60s onboarding. I am always skeptical of such marketing-y speech, so I kept track of how much time it took me: after registering, a link to a tutorial appears, which I clicked. It is a blog post explaining background info, not really a tutorial in the sense that it lets you do stuff and explains the background for what you did and why. Anyway, reading that took about 4 min, but by then, I still had zero experience doing stuff.

The real instructions came only later when I navigated back from the tutorial to "start mapping", where the three key actions were outlined:

• tap to select,
  • once for yes
  • twice for maybe
  • thrice for bad imagery
• swipe to navigate
• hold to zoom

No mention of where to get help or how to correct an action.

[Daniel-Mietchen]

Upon pressing "start" — still with an uneasy feeling of incompetence — there comes something closer to a real tutorial - an actual setting of six map tiles to tap on to indicate the presence of buildings.

Playing around with that also answered the questions above as to

• how to get help - there is an (i) sign at the top right that brings up the help screen with the three key actions
• how to correct an action - simply keep tapping until the tile turns into the proper color (green for yes, yellow for maybe, red for bad imagery, colorless for four taps, then green again).

That page also has a "Start mapping" text, which I have interpreted as a link, but it didn't react on tapping. So I went for swiping instead, which brought me to the next screen.

[Daniel-Mietchen]

On that next screen, there was another set of six tiles, and after tapping through them, I swiped to the next one and so forth.

Observations:

• some taps (ca. 40% or so) trigger a thank you message; while these were encouraging on the first screen, I started to ignore them by about the third, and wished I could switch them off by about the fifth
• I found it irritating
  • that the progress bar said after a few screens that I had mapped double-digit percentages of my area, which only became clearer after I reached 100%, when they offered to continue or to end the session.
  • not to have a scale, especially since the "tutorial" blog post spoke of round huts of which I could identify none, and I'm not sure how prominent they are in Guadeloupe anyway.
  • I could only zoom one level

[Daniel-Mietchen]

Ok, next round.

The help screen comes up again - probably not a bad idea but would be nice to be able to switch that off in the preferences.

Some screens did not have six tiles (e.g. just one), which was irritating - I was on a weak WiFi and initially thought this may be a connectivity issue, but after nothing changed for quite a while, I just swiped to the next screen, where six tiles loaded fine. It would be useful to either mark the "missing" tiles as "intentionally left black" or so, or — and perhaps even better — not to have such unused tiles, and to always load screens with six tiles instead, even if that means reinserting a tile that was already assessed earlier, or by someone else (I assume most or all tiles are assessed by multiple — perhaps around 2 or 3 — users anyway for quality control reasons).

[Daniel-Mietchen]

In the third round, I had many cloudy images that I marked as "bad imagery" but if I saw buildings in there, it would have been useful to indicate that already.

Another missing feature: I have no way to see how the mapping in Guadeloupe is proceeding, I don't see which areas of the islands I have swiped and tapped through, and I don't know how my data compares to experienced users, newbies or automated classifications of the same tiles.

[Daniel-Mietchen]

Some more observations from the following rounds:

• on some easy tile sets, I was tapping faster than the app would recognize, so I had to slow down in order to ensure it picked up my signals
• I was expecting to map buildings and roads, but so far, all my sessions were just about buildings.
• after finishing a session, the welcome screen actually gives some basic stats: "29% global progress by 69 mappers just like you" (in ALLCAPS, and decorated with a blood-red heart icon); still, there is no way to see this progress on a map, or to tap onto a map to select areas to work on (I had quite a few tile sets that were just water, which is probably something that could be filtered out automatically, but allowing for manual filtering would probably be a step forward).
• after the first screens, I went for indicating "yes" whenever there were recognizable buildings in the tiles, even in cases where most of the tiles were under cloud cover; my reasoning here is that the basic question that I am tasked to ask is whether there are buildings in this tile, and if I can already say yes despite the cloud coverage, then indicating the clouds is perhaps not a priority.
• in terms of the "thanks you"/ "great job" messages, they are getting annoying, but it would really be useful to have some quality indicator of my work
• heavy cloud coverage should be relatively straightforward to determine
• after syncing my data after one session, I got a very briefly displayed message saying something like "169 tasks synced", but the overall progress still stands at "29% global progress by 69 mappers just like you", which is not motivating. Would be good to have some measure of progress that actually changes once some session data is uploaded.
• the "missing tile" things is getting annoying - just had one set that stood at five tiles for like half a minute while I was typing in here, and then the final one (which was actually the fourth) did appear. So I do not know whether in some of those earlier tile sets that showed me missing tiles these might indeed have appeared when I had waited yet longer.
• perhaps only display the tiles when all six have loaded? And in the meantime, display something like "loading", initiating the loading of the next tile set once the current one is fully displayed?
• after another session, I got "33 tasks synced" (not sure why this number differs so much from the above - does this reflect the missing tiles issue, or that there were fewer "yes" tiles in this one?), but the overall progress still stands at "29% global progress by 69 mappers just like you"
• just when my thoughts about connectivity are intensifying, the app proposes to download stuff to work offline; not an option for me for the next few days, as I will likely not be much on good WiFi then, and if I am, then it'll be for work
• after some hundreds of additional tasks synced, the overall progress still stands at "29% global progress by 69 mappers just like you". this is demotivating. perhaps state — on a dedicated screen/ page if necessary — something like "x1 number of tiles processed, corresponding to x2 square kilometres, with x3 tiles indicating buildings, x4 perhaps buildings, x5 roads, x6 perhaps roads, x7 bad imagery", and each of the numbers could be accompanied by some confidence measure computed on the basis of multiple people (and perhaps machines) having rated the same tiles.

[Daniel-Mietchen]

I'm stopping here, as I now have a first understanding of MapSwipe and still lots of other things to process from the HOT Summit and to prepare for RDA.

I took some screenshot during my testing, in case that is relevant for follow-up.