Google giveth and Google taketh away…

So now that Google has dropped the old interface to Google Analytics and I’ve been full time on the new one, I have some opinions on the subject. It’s a bit of a mixed bag. The new interface is pretty and provides some nice new functionality - the two that I like the most are the ability to segment by landing page and the ability to view hourly visits for historical data as well as aggregate data. Those were some of the features I really wanted so I’m happy to have them.

Unfortunately, there’s problems too. I like the new modes of picking dates and date ranges. They’re easier to use for picking date ranges than the original UI. But it’s also a ton more clicking for simple stuff. In the old system if you just wanted to view something (not a range) you clicked on the day or the week or the month and pow you were there. Here, you need to click the upper right corner to drop the thing, then you click your date (or whatever) and then you click apply. For this easiest (and for me, most common) usage, it’s tripled the amount of clicking I need to do. It’s a win for more complex selection like ranges, but mostly what I need is quick access to the simple ones. So for me, it’s a little bit of a wash, maybe even a point to the old.

The Dashboard is great, in theory, but it doesn’t let me put up the reports that I really use - it only lets me put up and reorder various topline reports. I find that frustrating - if they let me put up the hourly visitor chart that they have it would go a long way toward making the thing a lot more useable for me (if you extrapolate the notion to adding other charts with a little more detail). As it is, to get to that particular chart, I need to click 3 or 4 times to get into it. It’s a great idea, but the execution isn’t as robust as I’d like.

Another thing is, generally speaking there’s probably 2 or 3 reports I’ll check, more or less, obsessively. In the old system, when you opened up a set of reports in the left nav, they’d stay open until you closed them. This way you could have several options opened at the same time, making most reports just one click away. In the new system, when you open something, the last thing you had open closed. So if you want to look at reports in the Visitors section and also in the Traffic Sources and Content sections, you need to click more times to reopen them and get back to your reports.

It also seems to have ruined Dashalytics, the OS X dashboard widget I used to look at the data. It used to report hourly visits and pages and give you some nice topline numbers for the day, week and month. Now it gives you fancier looking charts with less interesting information. If something’s on the Dashboard it’s because you want up to the minute information - but now Dashalytics just shows a ton of aggregate and historical information - you can find the daily visit, but only if you scroll your mouse to just the right point on the graph. Difficult and not something you can just click into and see in a second and click out.

Probably, though, my biggest beef with the new UI is that it is even further away from real time than the old UI was. The old one was typically 1-3 hours away from true. The new one is generally 2 or 3 hours further off than that. I used the old UI while they were running in parallel simply because it was always more current than the new. I thought that perhaps it was because they were running both at the same time and when they dropped the first one the new UI would speed up, unfortunately this has not come to pass.

The new Google Analytics is a nice app. If that’s all I’d ever known, I’d probably be happy with it. In some ways it is an improvment over the previous UI, it has added some really nice functionality (segmenting by landing pages! Thank you!!). Unfortunately for the way I use the app it took a really big hit in useability. Things that used to be a click away are now several. Information that used to be easily found is now buried many menus and several more hours away. I’d have preferred that they added the little bits of new functionality to the old UI and kept it’s responsiveness and ease of access.

Jul 25th, 2007 · Comments RSS · · · · · Tags: analytics · google