Added Search and Linkable Chart Timespans
About two weeks ago I submitted a post on reddit to try to garner some feedback from the community, and I actually got a few responses. Immediately, the biggest issue that came up seemed to be the lack of a way to find a particular game. I had my suspicions on this already, but it was good to see this validated as a big problem. Another issue that stuck out was that you have this chart on the game page, but if you want to refer to data outside of the default 48 hour window, the user would have to be told to click the specific timespan after visiting the page.
There were simple answers to both of these: search, and permalinking to chart timespans. The search bar sits at the top right of the page, and regarding the chart, the URL in the address bar should update as you change timespans. Check out the last 3 months of Natural Selection 2. Nice free weekend, huh?
Thanks to this feedback, the site's usability is far greater than before. Still, I'd say there's lot to be desired and there's much more I plan to do in the future. For example, the front page is a bit of a mess of numbers, it would be nice to compare games to eachother, and perhaps aggregate games into comparable groups like genres, publishers, developers, etc. Maybe that's for another article.
I await more feedback! Maybe you're having a problem, or you see a better way to visualize or interpet the data? Leave a comment on Trello, reddit, or via Twitter.