This is pretty cool. If I were in London, I'd use it.
You could integrate Google Maps to show you the least busy places in a certain part of London, so it could be used for "I've got an afternoon to kill. I'm over here; where can I go?"
Cool idea - is the % of foursquare users in a sample population consistent? What if Tuesday is "bus in the foreigners/elderly?" - valuable info regardless, but I'd be curious to know how that holds up.
Yes it could be expanded. Because the Foursquare api doesn't provide historical data it takes a few weeks of monitoring the venue before I have useful data for it however
One immediately apparent reason would be API rate limits from Foursquare. It's easy/practical to query for "who's here" for a limited number of venues a few times an hour, start doing it for hundreds or thousands of venues and you'll start running into problems...
Yeah, make it a smart phone app, charge $2.99 for it and include everywhere that foursquare supports, money to be made! Although maybe foursquare could just release a similar feature.
Whoops. I should integrate with http://opening-times.co.uk/ perhaps. Although places like the fantastic Soane and Geffrye seem to get very few Foursquare checkins even at the busiest of times
you're not measuring how busy a place is, but rather matching demographics between foursquare users and the various museums.
I wouldn't be surprised to find that foursquare check-in's is a very poor proxy for this kind of venue. For bars/clubs and coffee shops maybe, but you're measuring with the wrong stick. Having said that, it does seem to confirm common sense (that most places are busiest on the weekends and mid-week is quiet).
opening-times.co.uk doesn't looks like it carries museum opening hours. Actually a semweb data source of visitor attractions and their opening hours would be a very valuable resource. I don't think one exists.
edit: also, why can't I search or see a full list of all places?
edit: Also for SEO you should change the URL to something keyword-packed like whenshouldivisit.iamdanw.com/when-is-british-museum-busy and offer alias short links like whenshouldivisit.iamdanw.com/british-museum, etc.
Glass-half-empty vs graph-half-full problems abound in UX and the answer is always to use the one that tells the least lies. So in this case the graphs should represent people - how can you represent emptiness?
I would like to see actual people on the graph (not one person scaling) as this will show you exactly how busy each place is - and, if you know how big a place is you can estimate how full it will feel.
> actual people on the graph (not one person scaling)
yeah I couldn't find an image which showed exactly what I meant, but yes, that is what I had in mind.
Although you seem to be suggesting that you should be able to get a literal exact count of the people. I think that that won't be possible or useful because the data is aggregated over several timepoints. I guess "on mondays, approx 10 people visit" might be useful, but I see this graph as more of a general indicator of how busy a place generally is.
Using a repeating image of little stick people will hint to users that the bars represent visitor volume.
>Using a repeating image of little stick people will hint to users that the bars represent visitor volume.
This is a very good idea. Unfortunately his bars are vectors drawn with SVG, I don't think it allows background images.
Another, perhaps not as clear suggestion would be to simply add a "Smaller bars mean less busy" message under the graph, like you see on performance benchmarks.
Another reason software is a bottomless pit of opportunity. There are so many things that can be optimized if only the data can be put into the right hands in a usable form such as you've done here.
It would be great to see some real numbers on these graphs as there is a danger that some days are being reported as really busy when the n is really low.
Disagree. It's the whole point of the page, so it isn't excessively redundant if you say it more than one way... I'd just put a single column that's a different color (ie, green) for the best day, maybe with an embedded checkmark or some other indicator for the color blind.
1. The URL - would be better if it's a dedicated domain name (e.g. whenshouldigo.com).
2. I agree with the parent about the color coding. It might be more clear if you use a red-green spectrum for each day (e.g. red for the evening, when things might be more busy, and green for the morning, when things might be less busy).
Looks great, definitely a value-add yet very minimal. I sent my friends in London to it, could see it going a bit viral.
I found venue navigation very confusing. When clicking on the underlined 'tate modern' (top left) I expected to be given a choice of other venues. How do I see a list of venues? I can only discover them via the 'top lists' and 'Random'?
Thanks. I certainly need to add some kind of index/homepage that lists all the venues. The current 'venue roulette' navigation isn't exactly the best approach.
When I first went to the page, "Tate Modern" is the H1. The 'logo' at the top says "When should I visit Tate Modern?". That's great... except I have no idea what 'Tate Modern' is. Needs better separation of your general site/'pitch' from each individual attraction. Your homepage is currently taken over by some random museum, when I really want to search for the British Museum or whatever, and that's driving me away.
Similarly, that 'logo' link at the top has the attraction underlined. That makes me think it individually is a link, to the museum website, wikipedia page on it, etc. Instead, when I mouse over it the entire sentence turns in to a link back to your app's homepage... when I really wanted an outside link to the thing that was underlined. Don't inject the current page title into that logo, unless you're actually linking to it's official page or wikipedia or etc.
Nice one. This will help me avoid the sort of people who use Foursquare, or who like playing with their mobile devices while in art galleries. And, I'll assume, will help ensure I have plenty of opportunity to meet others like me.
Great project. Is it possible to include the best time of the day to visit, e.g. "quiet on Wednesday mornings"? Also: Do you adjust for longer opening times? Maybe some venues close sooner on some days.
Good call on using foursquare to do the work. I'm not sure if you can use this source to include the best times of the year also, but this would be ideal. When people ask themselves (or others) "when should I visit?" they are often referring to "what time of the year should I visit?"
For a 24 hour job, I'm wowed. I can see a lot of expansion potential, notably in adding location (by country, state, city) and categories (i.e. breaking it down by museums, theaters, parks, etc.).
Consider making the graphs into a widget for local tourist, hotel, and city pages.
Very nice job. I don't have a use for it since I'm not in London, but I like your implementation and design. A comparison feature would be nice, so if you're uncertain where you want to go one day, you can compare activity.
Another cool feature would be a temporal zoom - let me see that data juxtaposed over different months or weeks (I imagine it likely that the busy/free days vary depending on the season); conversely, it would be useful to be able to zoom in to the hour for specific days (best hours to visit today). That would help either plan vacation visit agendas, or determine an intra-day itinerary.
Shouldn't you switch the columns with museums list to see which one is least busy first? This will be more consistent with your supposed goal and will correspond with the fact that you say which museum is quieter first above (just below the bars).
Very nice. For extra whizzyness you should ajaxify it so you can use raphael's lovely animation in place of page transitions, like http://populationpyramid.net/
I made something somewhat similar a few years back because I thought it was something that I would use. I did not follow through, but I'm glad you did. I think there's a lot to be done with this. Good luck!
It's always interesting introducing a feedback loop into a complex adaptive system. I wonder how close to an even distribution this would make attendance if it became hugely popular.
I thought this was going to be a travel website that gave you the best time of year weather wise to visit a particular city. Your idea is cool anyhow :)
I like your idea but what are you going to do when a lot of people start visiting on the least busy days turning them into busy days? I know from personal experience that Wednesday afternoons between 1-4pm are usually the quietest times in movie theatres and other venues that tend to be packed on weekends so by putting this information in people's hands you're messing with my zen dude.
But since this system only incorporates data from the past few weeks the shift towards quite days will be detected pretty fast and thus these days will start to be visible as busy. It will balance itself out I think
Since only a small percentage of the UK population use Foursquare I'd be more inclined to be concerned it might head in the opposite direction (i.e. relatively small numbers of people using this site to identify quiet days to visit are substantially more likely to check in - resulting in more noise than signal)
Wednesdays used to be quietest for cinemas in the UK but now it's one of the busiest thanks to the Orange 241 offer that's been running the past few years
You could integrate Google Maps to show you the least busy places in a certain part of London, so it could be used for "I've got an afternoon to kill. I'm over here; where can I go?"