research
UK unemployment drops… unexpectedly?
Jan 21st
Unemployment in the UK has fallen for the first time in 18 months, surprising many analysts. But these analysts clearly haven’t been looking at search trends for unemployment-related keywords.
Can search predict the future?
Dec 23rd
Today, we often search for information about upcoming major events in our lives – both good and bad – before we experience them. When facing financial difficulty or unemployment, many of us will go online at the earliest opportunity to look for help and guidance. And when we’re considering major financial decisions such as buying [...]
Online behaviour and the economic downturn
Oct 1st
Online intelligence service Hitwise released a report last week claiming that UK internet usage patterns were changing in response to the current economic situation. The full press release is here. Hitwise gathers its data by looking at the traffic logs of its clients’ websites, which number around 1,500. These websites are divided up into a [...]
The dregs of e-commerce
Sep 26th
I’m currently carrying out some research into open-source e-commerce platforms. The research is at a pretty early stage and I’m still putting together the list of packages that we’ll then go on to assess in detail. While putting this short-list together I’m visiting quite a lot of ‘showcase’ sites for each package on my long-list. [...]
Word clouds and silver linings
Jul 14th
Recently I carried out some user testing on a late-beta website. At the end of each test session, participants were given a piece of paper listing over 100 adjectives – both positive and negative – and asked to tick the ones most applicable to the website they’d been using. As the week of testing came [...]
