Thank you very much for your feedback and time! We know that we do not cover aspects like skin tone - and we would love to somehow implement that. The problem is that to get the best statistical results, the "decision-influencing" differences between images ideally have to be reduced to just the exact condition (e.g. different breast size). Every other additional variation (e.g. skin tone) would "blur" the data.
As we need 88 picture pairs to cover all required breast conditions anyways, it is practically impossible to take any other aspects into the survey (e.g. skin tone) without completely exploding the number of pictures and blurring the data. So we apologize for that "inconvenience" - but we haven't found a better solution.
Thank you very much for your support and feedback!
I wouldn't even call it white skin, actually. It's not really a flesh color; breaking out the Digital Color Meter, it's slightly warmer than a grey.
Then there's the way light reflects off of it, some of it looking rough or dirty in a way skin usually doesn't, with some parts brightly lit as if by one very bright source. (I think glare explains some of it.) The breasts themselves often look brighter, and sometimes cleaner, than everything else; occasionally they do match the surrounding skin, which naively looks a lot better until I realize I have to abstract out the lighting.
Even if you can't vary the skin tones, I think that using more uniform lighting would help. And maybe something dumb like spraypainting the main body a mono-color would work, although that might make it more complex to show scars.
Another option is to have a 2-4 skin tones and just randomly select one for each respondent. It's introducing another variable but presumably you could collapse over it.
Thank you so much for your time, effort and support. I am very sorry for the inconvenience. I checked the server multiple times - despite the unexpected huge amount of traffic from HN the server still seems to be fine. So I am not sure what causes these long loading times for some participants. I am very sorry for that - I will try to my best to improve this somehow.
Thank you again for your support!
Just a quick update: I have improved the code and think that I thereby was able to reduce loading times significantly. Thank you for your effort and patience - it really means a lot!
Is the server in the university/hospital and are you testing from the same building? Try testing from your home or as fas as possible. Also use another browser, so the images are not in the cache or something.
Thank you very much for your feedback and support! I already tested it from a "remote" location.
I have optimized the code tonight and think I was able to improve performance significantly!
I am very sorry for the inconvenience - but I never expected that amount of traffic on the site, so I was a little bit overwhelmed by that :-)
But I hope that the issue is improved now!
Thank you for your interest and taking the time. Did you select a gender and age group? If one of those selections is not selected, you will be taken back to the landing page. Could this maybe cause the problem?
Thank you for your support!
Thank you so much for your support and this kind feedback! We will do our best - and if only one surgery can be improved, we already helped one patient to get a better result than otherwise.
Thank you for your time and support!
Thank you for your comment and interest!
We will definately publish all data - after all we want to help patients and surgeons so we have to get all the data out to them! At the moment we are just a little bit overwhelmed by the amount of feedback and participants to be honest :-)
But of course all data will be published! We have an email subscription box at the end of the survey - we will notify everyone who is interested as soon as we publish the data.
What exactly do you mean with metadata and measurements? Do you mean the breast sizes?
The breast conditions are rendered from 3D-measured breasts of real patients - so the displayed conditions and breast sizes are completely based on real measurements and the corresponding measures (e.g. cup-size).
Thank you so much for this kind feedback!
To be honest I am completely overwhelmed by the amount of responses and feedback - I never expected that. I will happily put together more in-depth information about how the project came to life and how everything works! I just have to try to keep up with all comments and responses first :-)
Thank you for your support!
Oh I'm sure nobody expects you to write anything up tonight :) After getting along a bit further in the survey, I'm also interested in how you're going to approach the analysis of the responses, more specifically, how you're going to separate out the personal preferences of respondents, since I've had a few cases now where the choice was basically "do I find large breasts more attractive than smaller ones" - even if there were some minor other factors at play in the specific images. Anyway, good luck, although I do agree with some other posters that you might get more people to complete the whole thing if you'd show them fewer images; it takes a long time to get through a full round.
Thank you for your comment. I have used this spinner for 5 or 6 years already. It is just a GIF - to be honest I can't remember where I got it from back then.
Thank you very much for your time taking part in the survey and your great feedback.
That is exactly our goal - to help patients with decision making.
Patients often are quite unsure about what is the aesthetically best option for them and want to know what people prefer in general - and the least we should be able to do for patients is give the good and research-backed advice.
We know that some picture combinations look very similar - however there are no duplicates in the survey. However of course, sometimes it is quite difficult to make a decision.
But we also measure the time of every decision - so in the end we will be able to tell which aspects are quite obvious and therefore quick and easy to decide - and which are not.
Good to hear you thought of it, I would say that due to load time, the response measure should be suspect. Using myself as an example, I clicked, read some news, came back and clicked, go get a drink, etc. Took me over an hour to finish.
Really? I am super sorry for that inconvenience - and even more thankful that you took the time to finish despite these enormous loading times. I will try my best to improve that! Thank you so much for that feedback!
Thank you so much for your effort and support! I have tried to improve the code and hope that performance is significantly better now. I am really sorry for the inconvenience!
The good thing is that due to the study design and the database architecture, every vote (even if you clicked just one image) is taken into the statistic! So every click helps!
Thank you so much for your effort! Greetings from Germany :-)
Thank you for your reply and your feedback.
I'm not sure about the NSFW tag - however if you select age under 18 you cannot start the survey, so I hope it is ok without the NSFW tag.
The order of the images is completely randomized - so the survey is never the same for two participants.
The images however follow a complex algorithm - no image pair shows up twice. The number of images - although admittedly quite high - is the absolute minimum amount to simulate every important condition/decision-combination relevant for surgery.
The load time was optimized - however depending on your location and server load it might of course be a little to long (I try to further improve that). Thank you very much for your support!
How many images are there in total? It looks like the images are generated from smaller parts that are downloaded separately.
Perhaps you can download all the parts in hidden images and combine them on demand. Also, perhaps you can render the images in a hidden canvas while the user is selecting the previous pair of images, so when the user makes a click the change has no pause.
