We're using it to collect and heatmap yes/no opinions, worldwide, for the Scottish Independence Referendum next month. We'd love to know how you feel, and I'm particularly interested in any feedback you can give me on performance or UX.
This is described in the intro of "Assessment of probability density estimation methods: Parzen window and Finite Gaussian Mixtures"
http://www0.cs.ucl.ac.uk/staff/c.archambeau/publ/iscas_aa06....
(as well as many other places that just happened to be the first google result)
email me if you want more details, I am ex-informatics.
It doesn't matter to me, though. I'm not Scottish!
* = within certain restrictions, something like a couple of years resident prior to the referendum. Don't quote me on that :)
It's probably good that they added the question in though as I'm fascinated by the responses outside Scotland!
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Would your preference be to see the heatmap worldwide before being asked for your location?
We're looking at the copy (to better highlight what data is stored and displayed).
Thank you for the feedback.
A couple of things:
1) At any kind of scale, with smaller data-sets, the blue and red are overlapping in places to form purple and the user has to work out from the hue which is doing better. E.g. Edinburgh looks like it has a high blue content but I need to zoom in to see that really it's dominated by a massive blue blob on Grassmarket.
2) (Wonkish) The YES and NO buttons are stacked vertically with no margin. If the order isn't randomised already I'd consider doing that and separating the buttons.
3) I'm not from Scotland, but I did vote. If you're collecting that data also, why not show it? It'd be interesting for sure. We can often see Scotland across the water from our town, there are plenty of people here who consider themselves Scottish and others besides who have a dog in the fight.
Looking forward to the 18th anyways. Yes or No, it'll be a hell of a party!
1. I'm looking at the way google maps heatmaps lump results together at different zoom levels. If anyone has any experience with this, I'd love to hear about it.
2. This is exactly right. On the todo list now.
3. If you voted outside scotland (and the browser got a location), then it'll be displayed on the map in the place you voted from. Is this what you meant?
Really appreciate all the comments.
Belfast voting Yes and Dublin voting No.. Now there's a turnup for the books.
- display the heatmap first - have a prominent link saying something like: add your vote to the map. When someone clicks that link, ask them to enter their location (city or town and country), then ask them the same question the Scots will vote for in the referendum: Should Scotland be an independent country? Yes/No.
I think the auto-detect location causes too many problems and may have privacy implications if, as another poster says, you can identify quite precise locations.
What would be really nice would be a map similar to the Book Depository ("Watch people shop" map):
http://www.bookdepository.com/live
In this case, you would display a pop-up each time someone voted with the name of their town or city and whether they'd voted Yes or No.
One nitpick - don't show the heatmap first if you want correct poll results. This heavily biases the undecided people into "oh, everyone in Aberdeen says No...I guess I say No then too!"
Auto detection of location is proving to be a bit tricky - we're seeing a lot of votes clustered around internet exchanges in places.
Thanks for taking a look!
Edit: Working now. I'd love to see a breakdown of votes (total yes/no and world yes/no vs scotland yes/no).
Doesn't seem to be a way to override the 'detected' location?
(Good luck with project tho!)
1. if this is meant to show both votes, then a pie chart for each position (town/council) would be more effective 2. the blur is not clearly visible at all when zooming out completely 3. taking into account 'votes' from outside the country concerned is a bit confusing as pointed out in another comment, the rules for the referendum states that you have to be in Scotland to cast you vote.
However, I had a look at the http://bubb.al/ website and I can see how this could be used in a contained area (like an attraction park) or more generally if you could tie this up with a social media to show the mood of a user population in a wide area.
On a side note, I am surprised you are not located near the Quarter Mile. ;)
1. We went with a map over a series of pie charts as we'd like to create something a bit more engaging for the user.
2. Agreed: The blur is causing me several issues, and is something I'm absolutely still working on.
3. Obviously these "votes" won't be counted, we're just trying to get a sense of how people in different part of the world feel about it.
Thanks for taking a look at our site! Attraction parks are a use-case we're absolutely something we're looking into.
We're currently based in a tech incubator called CodeBase (http://www.thisiscodebase.com/). Quarter Mile is a beautiful building, but you can't beat being surrounded by other startups!
edit: back up now
Thanks for taking a look!
Thanks for taking a look for us!
So how to you get the location? Because it isn't working for me.
