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The task in the user study was to create an isoluminant colormap from the standard rainbow colormap. I felt that making the rainbow colormap isoluminant was a good demonstration of how to transform a non-perceptual, but ubiquitous, colormap into a perceptual one. Also, having an isoluminant rainbow map is a good starting point for bivariate map based on hue and lightness.

Our hypothesis for the study was that the face-based method would measure the same lightness as the MDB method, but with better precision.

So the participants had to go through the six control points of the rainbow colormap, adjusting their luminance to match a fixed gray, six trials per color. This was done for both the face-based and MDB tasks. The trials were randomized in order of colors and initial contrast polarity. Half the participants started with the face-based task, and half with the MDB task.