— March 29, 2010 —
By Tobin Harris
Our client CrowdSpeak recently asked us to provide something that helps them see where their iElect users are in the UK.
iElect is a free political iPhone app that lets you see details of the up-coming election, including current MP, candidates and general trivia. It’s available on the App Store now.
Who’s Using Your iPhone app?
Knowing where you’re users come from is incredibly useful; it can help you monitor the effectiveness of a press release or advertising campaign. This kind of intelligence can really help you make informed decisions in the future.
Seeing The Data
So, our mission was to help CrowdSpeak see where their iPhone app users come from. iElect asks users for a postcode when they launch the app, so we can use this data to show a UK map like this:
This is DEMONSTRATION data only. Each dot summarises how many iPhone app users there are in that area. As the dots get increasingly darker, the more users there are in a given area. All user personal details are kept private and secure, not even CrowdSpeak look at these.
1.8 million data points, in real-time
The map is summarising over 1.8 million data points, and is updated in real-time. As soon as a new user signs up, the folks at CrowdSpeak can see that fact reflected on the map. The map can be securely accessed by our customer using their web browser.
How did we do it?
The visualisation runs entirely in the browser using SVG. We used the great Raphael library to render the map and points. An SQL query aggregates the user/postcode data into low-resolution co-ordinates. All in all it’s only about 50 lines of code. We’ll be posting full technical details of how we created this visualisation in the near future.
Information at your fingertips helps you make better choices
Finding ways of helping customers get insights into their data is both fun and useful. We believe that information like this can give you hard facts that let you make better choices in the future.
