It’s just graphic design…. or is it?

The importance of good User Interface Design can be the difference between product acceptance and rejection in the marketplace. If the end-users feel it is not easy to learn, not easy to use, or too cumbersome, an otherwise excellent product will fail. Good User Interface Design can make a product easy to understand and use, which results in greater user acceptance.

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En el excelente blog de Avinash Kaushik, encontramos un post sobre la herramienta Measure Map.

Se trata de una herramienta de web analytics en donde prima la facilidad de uso, y para ello siguen uno de los preceptos de la usabilidad: concentrarse en una tipología específica de usuarios que quieren realizar una tarea concreta.

En efecto, measure map es una herramienta de estadísticas web pensada específicamente para blogs. Toda una novedad en el mundo de web analytics que plantea la pregunta de si en el futuro veremos más y más herramientas que sirvan para medir un determinado tipo…

This is a bit off topic for this blog, but I like the thoroughness of Avinash’s posts - and it’s Friday - and everyone is entitled to a tangent every now and then. While I am normally well behind the learning curve of his blog, Occam’s Razor; this one seemed to make sense for one reason or another. I also really liked the look of the web analytics tool, Measure Map (Google’s, in Alpha), that he uses to illustrate his points about the role that UI plays in the web analytics environment.

So without further ado, I recommend that you read Web Analytics Tools: Does User Interface (UI) Matter? [...]

ps: I’m looking forward to a new release of my favorite non-GA tool in another 10 days or so.

Most analytics packages do not give enough control and flexibility to the user when it comes to trending and graphing data.

Thanks for the comment.

Avinash.

I liked your answer to June; great YAARAWAV (Yet Another Avinash’s Rant Against Web Analytics Vendors) ;-). You’re right to challenge them, and I think it’s about time we “de-focus” on behavioral analysis applications and really start thinking about how to articulate all the methods at hand. But since that market is invested with so much money and commercial interests, no wonder conversations so often turn around products.

Representing data, and better yet, information, is not an easy task, especially since the actual “look” will have a deep imapact on how it is understood. To that effect, I think it is healthy to revisit the data representation theories and discussions (”How To Lie With Charts”, etc.). But your call for more clarity / ease of use is quite relevant.

#1) Except for the Comments reports there is nothing non-standard about MeasureMap. You are right it is a tool created to measure blogs, but the uniqueness is in how it captures data, not how it presents it. After that it simply presents standard web analytics data: Visitors, page view, exits, referrers, search key terms, browser versions, time of visits, countries etc. Yet even in presenting this data that is in every single web analytics tool it simply blows everything out of the water.

This at a time when a recent study indicated that the most confusing web analytics terms to Marketers are: Visits, Visitors, Unique Visitors (!!!). :) I doubt that would be the case if all tools took a similar approach to presenting Metrics (I’ll exclude Mr. Marshall’s ClickTracks from that, I think he and Dr. Turner are amazingly focussed in what they provide).

#2) Your comment brought another thought to mind. There are actually not that many businesses on the web. Ecommerce, Support, Lead Gen, Portals and maybe another couple.

Blogs have been seriously around for three years, Measure Map for around 18 months, if memory serves me right.

I wonder why we don’t have hyper-focussed tools that are simply fantastic at measuring and then using a customer centric UI to present data/analysis? Should OmniTrends have a version that just does ecommerce? Should VisualTure have one just for support? Perhaps WebCoreStory Analytics can have one for Portals? I am sure there is plenty of money to me made by providing vertical solution?

Yet we have tools that try to be everything for everyone and are nothing for anyone. But surely that can’t be a excuse to not invest in analysis friendly User Interfaces?

Now if other vendors do this, stop being YART (Yet Another Reports Tsunami) and do Verticals then they owe you lots of royalty for your suggestion! :)

Thanks again so much, it is great to have feedback from a industry legend.

-Avinash.

I think that Measure Map works so well, in part, because it measures just blogs - and it bluntly asserts, “If you have a blog, here are precisely the numbers you care about.”

Oh, if only all web content had such clear goals! On the whole I believe it’s easier to define KPIs - and therefore easier to apply a nice, shiny UI - to sites with narrow scope and clear goals.

– June

Thanks! I thought I was crazy when I would tell friends that some of thetools available look like they are meant for accountants…lol At any rate, I’m a convert and believer of Confidence. Discoverability, Context, and Short-circuit Thinking. Many have echoed the difficult here on making reports relevant. In fact, our company had the same issues when selecting an Email provider. We went for ease-of-use rather than 4,000 widgets that do everything, if you had the time, energy and brain capacity to do it. I’m curious to see what will happen to Measure Map. Perhaps a GA version that would be so simple and beautiful.

So instead of adding more stats and more info, we totally revamped the look and feel, made it nice and pretty with vibrant colors, bigger and “bubblier” fonts, and everyone has loved it. It’s almost as if people are more “into it” when something looks nice and easy on the eyes, and the information or statistics found within are really secondary, which sounds weird for me to say, but it’s true to a degree.

Another good post Avinash!

But I always tell them two things first:

1) You would be better off paying a training and implementation specialist like GA-Experts to teach you properly, not a practitioner like me (but see ‘price’ above)!

2) Please take a serious look at Clicktracks instead. It does some very useful things easily which are hard with Google but, even more important: the interface and the way the tools are implemented hand-holds you and guides you in the direction of looking at ‘interesting’ stuff instead of a maze of menus. It encourages analysis and thought, not simple report viewing. And the freedom to segment on a whim, and apply the segment labels retrospectively, encourages that enquiring “I wonder what happened? I wonder who? I wonder if? I wonder…” mentality. Freedom to analyse, in fact.

From the look of this the Measure Map example takes things even further. I am fascinated!

What I really don’t understand though, is why its been in hibernation since Google acquired the company. I also keep hoping that some of that visual “goodness” will filter through to Google Analytics.

I’d like to see Ian Tickle from WebTrends elaborate on his thoughts in a comment. Vendor panels tend to become fragmented and rushed (you want to keep up a good pace and don’t have all day) so it’s good to get the full picture somewhere else.