Show HN: Scottish Independence Referendum Heatmap

I think you are publishing locations that are too specific. I can identify houses, from which the votes were cast. This information can be abused and is therefore dangerous. Please do not publish such information without informing the user loudly and clearly of the implications of voting.

Looks interesting, congrats on getting it shipped!<p>A couple of things:<p>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&#x27;s dominated by a massive blue blob on Grassmarket.<p>2) (Wonkish) The YES and NO buttons are stacked vertically with no margin. If the order isn&#x27;t randomised already I&#x27;d consider doing that and separating the buttons.<p>3) I&#x27;m not from Scotland, but I did vote. If you&#x27;re collecting that data also, why not show it? It&#x27;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.<p>Looking forward to the 18th anyways. Yes or No, it&#x27;ll be a hell of a party!

This is a nice idea. My UX suggestions:<p>- 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: <i>Should Scotland be an independent country?</i> Yes&#x2F;No.<p>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.<p>What would be really nice would be a map similar to the Book Depository (&quot;Watch people shop&quot; map):<p><a href="http://www.bookdepository.com/live" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bookdepository.com&#x2F;live</a><p>In this case, you would display a pop-up each time someone voted with the name of their town or city and whether they&#x27;d voted Yes or No.

The (Scottish) startup I&#x27;m working for builds a contextual publishing platform called Bubbal (&quot;context&quot; based on a user&#x27;s location and interests, as well as time of day).<p>We&#x27;re using it to collect and heatmap yes&#x2F;no opinions, worldwide, for the Scottish Independence Referendum next month. We&#x27;d love to know how you feel, and I&#x27;m particularly interested in any feedback you can give me on performance or UX.

I don&#x27;t think a heatmap is the best representation for this kind of data:<p>1. if this is meant to show both votes, then a pie chart for each position (town&#x2F;council) would be more effective 2. the blur is not clearly visible at all when zooming out completely 3. taking into account &#x27;votes&#x27; 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.<p>However, I had a look at the <a href="http://bubb.al/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;bubb.al&#x2F;</a> 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.<p>On a side note, I am surprised you are not located near the Quarter Mile. ;)

Looks like a population map.

Just a side note. The map is continuously trying to locate me in Birmingham which I guess is my ISP&#x27;s end-point connection to the internet, whereas I am actually in Edinburgh. I am using a few different extension in chrome and in firefox that normally block advert&#x2F;analytics request, but this time the extensions are disabled to check for interferences.<p>So how to you get the location? Because it isn&#x27;t working for me.

To be clear, what is the question -- is it &quot;Do you want independence&quot;, or is it &quot;Do you want unity&quot;?

You broke my browser (Safari). I said yes to giving location and it located me - then asked me again, and again and again. The only way out was to allow it to remember my decision for 24 hours. Then the site told me it couldn&#x27;t locate me despite having a pin on my house.

I wanted to see what you have so far, but since I&#x27;m not Scottish, I didn&#x27;t want to vote first. I denied access to location data, received a message saying I couldn&#x27;t vote without location, and then had no way to view the current data on the map.

Doesn&#x27;t work for devices that can&#x27;t accurately provide location information. For example, I live near Aberdeen, but my ISP is in London - so this shows me as in London.<p>Doesn&#x27;t seem to be a way to override the &#x27;detected&#x27; location?

I&#x27;m afraid I can&#x27;t see a thing, is it down due to the load coming from HN? Just a white screen with a sort of google-maps-ish compass in a box. I&#x27;m very keen to see something like this, with the referendum so close!<p>edit: back up now

I don&#x27;t know anything about Scottish politics, but as a generality, it looks like most larger cities vote Yes while the smaller towns have people voting No. Can anyone with insight explain why that&#x27;d be?

The colour blue for one of the result sets is a poor choice as the map is drawn in blue &#x2F; turquoise. You need 2 colours for the results which are of a similar distinguishability against the map colour.

You should include the total respective votes with the key so the accuracy of the data can be compared to other polls. Maybe even a break down of the UK&#x2F; Ireland&#x2F; Europe&#x2F; Rest of World.

What is &quot;vote every 24 hours and show your support&quot; about?

You should post it on &#x2F;r&#x2F;Scotland on Reddit!