connecting*the*dots

First off, thanks to the good folks at Adaptive Path for granting me an invite to review the *alpha* version of their first web service, Measure Map. Onto the review…

Usefulness: Interaction Design

Knowing the Adaptive team, I’m sure they did their homework in modeling design personae and context  scenarios to drive their interface, function and behavioral requirements, yet being that this version of Measure Map is an alpha release, it would be a little unfair of me to review the usefulness of the service as if it were completely mature. That being said, here’s my review as a potential design persona, representing an archetypal mix of blogger, designer, marketer and technologist.

Dashboard

Bubbled up to the surface of the service is a default presentation of:

• Number of visitors who have been to my blog today
• Number of links which been used from other sites to navigate to my blog today
• Number of comments left on my blog today
• Number of posts visited today
• Popular posts for today (with an RSS feed for placement on my blog)
• A dedicated messaging area for presenting upcoming features

While the interface satisfies my immediate need for analyzing recent activity when logging into the service—stitching together the decentralized activity of people across the web into a centralized interface for simple digestion—it fails to give me a quick view of who is accessing the blog and where they are traveling within.

My TypePad stats tool may not be chock full of the features found here, but onLoad it does provide me with a display that communicates a narrative of actors and movement. A potential solution would be to display a sliced view of these stats in the lower half of the interface when clicking on an umbrella icon of the large icons at the top of the screen. That would be a smart use of Ajax.

Primary Sections

If Visitors equates with unique visitors, then I’m pretty geeked already. That qualitative recognition is hard to produce, but it seems as though this is what Adaptive has provided, as on they present a percentage statistic of the number of daily visitors who are return users.

The dynamic graph of visitor traffic is extremely useful for a default quick glance of today’s traffic, or by simply pulling on a widget handle, exposing traffic over n period of time. AP also provides a sweet linear navigation devise, which dynamically shifts the traffic view over two week intervals.

Links are broken up into two categories: incoming (including search terms) and outgoing. Incoming links are standard tracks across all services, while outgoing links nicely differentiates from my basic TypePad stat tool. Outgoing links help me understand the movement of my audience, yet for some reason AP decided against displaying movement through internal links. Understanding where people are coming from and what captures their interest to leave my blog is great, but I need to understand how people are moving throughout my own domain.

Typepad produces this stat and I’ve found it very useful. Session interfaces with a cross section of explicit unique entrances, movement and exits might be too much for the free version of this service, but displaying internal links without the stitching would be very useful.

The dynamic graph operates with the same efficiency and usefulness as the previous section.

The Comments interface displays comments left today, with a link to a page displaying comments, and post that "got comments." I don’t understand what the second stat refers to, as my total number of  comments have been tracked and the number here only reflects the test comment I left today.

That being said, the drill-down visitor comment page is a nice quick view of comment activity across my blog. I can only imagine how useful it would be to an owner of a high traffic blog, such as Daily Kos or AMERICAblog.

The dynamic graph operates with the same efficiency and usefulness as the previous sections.

The Posts interface follows the same UI construct of each of the previously mentioned areas. It displays the complete number of posts on the blog, with the number visited today and how the top 10 posts are drawing today (very neat).

The dynamic graph operates with the same efficiency and usefulness as the previous sections.

Secondary Sections

The Browsers page displays stats with browser logos within relatively scaled graphs. Very easy to read and digest. It would be nice to see platforms and resolution stats as well, though.

Stats for the Country of visitor origin are displayed within context a clean world map, with zoom capabilities and rollover country tool tips (a nice feature for a geography refresher, as well as helping bridge global blogging)

The Times that visitors arrived is clearly rendered within a dynamically generated graph, which displays the number of visitors per hour

The usefulness of the overall service is very high, especially for an alpha release. The behavioral and functional foundation is clean, consistent and ready for smart iteration.

Usability:
UI Design | Visual Design | Language| Presentation Layer

The user interface immediately struck me as one with a high degree of clarity, reduced down to a elegant and well structured design. Only primary and secondary colors are used with sprinkled, subtle visual clues, such as the Link area and RSS feeds tying together through the use of orange as a signifier of "connection" or "linking."

Explanatory and functional copy across the service is bold, clearly written and presented with the proper degree of contrast to ensure readability. The Visitor area copy and functionality is a little vague, as it leads me to believe that the number of visitors reflects unique visitors, which would be a great service to provide. I’d only ask AP to reinforce this with more direct copy in the interface if this is actually the case.

Visual displays of quantitative information (previous examples) throughout the service are extremely simple and powerful, both graphically and in terms of pertinent information. The dynamic presentation of graphs and data views doesn’t suffer from latency issues, and the experience is elegant enough to support the future addition of Ajax presentation features when needed. Adaptive did a great job in building this service from the ground up, as each design decision seems extremely well thought out.

How Did Measure Map Measure Up?

Overall, the presentation of Measure Map is a joy of an experience to view, read, manipulate and explore. Bloggers are going to be able to digest this experience with very few usability difficulties. I fall in the advanced camp, so some of my needs aren’t fully supported, but as an alpha release, man, this thing is looking like a home run.

Congrats, Adaptive!

Related reviews:

Flickr & QOOP
Google Reader
Flock
Yahoo! News w/ blog search
A9 Yellow Pages (.ppt | 5.2mb)

UPDATE: Check out some of the other early reviews across the web

Tags: A9, Adaptive Path, Ajax, analytics, blogging, design, experience design, Flickr, Google, innovation, internet, Measure Map, progressive, QOOP, research, review, RSS, TypePad, World 2.0, Yahoo!.