Of the most commonly available methods for visualising data, radar graphs seem to be the least used. When I asked for examples on UXExchange, there were very few that people could think of. So what makes people avoid them and why are they so rare? Under the radar When you look at a radar graph, [...]
Whenever I tell people about Thunderbolt, one of the first questions they ask is “why don’t you make money from it?” It’s a reasonable question; last year, Thunderbolt had over 3 million page views from over 600,000 unique visitors. Sure, it’s not anywhere near the numbers that the big sites get, but it’s enough to [...]
When I founded Thunderbolt over nine years ago, the web was a very different place. There was no Facebook, MySpace, YouTube, Flickr or even Wikipedia. Nine years is a huge amount of time on the web and most sites don’t manage to last half of that, especially smaller ones. So how did we manage to [...]
When I was in Edinburgh last May, I met Philip Roberts, who handled the development for the games website SquareGo at the time. It was the first time that I’d talked to someone who does a similar job to what I do at Thunderbolt and it was incredibly interesting. Over a few drinks, we chatted [...]
As part of our final year at university, we each have to create a program and write our dissertation on it. My project is well under way and as I’ll be writing more about it over the coming months, I thought I’d introduce and explain it. In short, I’ve chosen to create an online stock [...]
White Stuff is probably one of the best kept secrets on the high street, having gone from a small skiwear retailer to a very profitable upmarket outfitter. They have dozens of shops across the country, but don’t advertise and avoid opening stores in any shopping centres. Their quirky marketing – they used mannequins with squirrel [...]
I love music, but I’ve hardly seen any bands live. Why? Because I never have any idea when artists are playing. Concert information has traditionally been very fragmented, with no central, dedicated service providing a single overview of what’s going on. Few artist websites provide an RSS feed and Last.fm‘s events section does a poor [...]
One interesting point I picked up from Paco Underhill’s book Why We Buy is that people don’t just buy goods online, but do research as well. We gather information about products we’re considering so that when we do go to a shop, we have a greater understanding of what we’re paying for before we hand [...]