connecting*the*dots

When I heard through the grapevine last year that Adaptive Path’s secret project was an AJAXy blog analytic tool, I was psyched to see what was going to hit the market.

The alpha release didn’t disappoint. It was powerful, yet simple to understand/use and had a few features (most notably, the mapping feature) with a bunch of potential. I ended up writing a glowing review and a follow-up post with a few suggestions for improvements. I’ve been using the service ever since… well, to be completely accurate, I’ve been trying to use the service ever since.

The above is the message that has greeted me every time I’ve attempted to sign on for the past few months. I’d post the problem to the MM message board, but that thing is about as helpful as a Republican in a hurricane. If I were a jaded human being, I’d say that MM was a thesis project for Jeff to become acquired by Google and there were never plans for long-term support or development of Measure Map.

But I’m not jaded…

So, I’m now looking for another analytics tool. I’d like for it to have a sweet interface and a bunch of ways to slice and dice my readership data. Mint has always been an option, but I’d rather not install anything on my server. Does anyone have other suggestions?

UPDATE: I’ve installed Mint (with some tweaking assistance from John, thanks man!) and I’m lovin’ it! The great thing about MM was its clean interface — really simple to understand — but conversely, the experience was akin to using a ladder, as I had to travel up and down the interface categories to get to the details of my data. With Mint, all of my data is presented in one simple to understand interface. No navigation necessary. Great job, Shaun!

For the past three weeks I’ve been using Measure Map pretty religiously, trying to get a feel for its depth to see if it’ll be useful as a tool for me to use moving forward. My first review touched upon the usefulness of the features, but admittedly, it was much more of a review of the presentation. After pounding on it some more, I’ve a few more thoughts on the service (remember, this is still an alpha release):

Searching For Search
Measure Map presents the search terms that led visitors to my site from three major search engines: Google, Yahoo! and MSN. Below are the terms the were used between 11/05 and 11/20:

68
boondocks
bo peabody
bush crony appointments
bush lies
"contextual column"
"courtney bolton" new york
"David Reid" Baghdad
Dick Chaney and FBI Leak
DOTs
download ofoto
DUMB AND DUMBER
efrat yardeni
evangelic green card
"farrakhan"
farrakhan syracuse university
"Free Flow of Information Act"
Greensboro Troublemaker
Hadj guestbook 2005   
haiku George Bush
impeach Bush Now
javol
"jon stewart" + crossfire
Louis Farrakhan Rosa parks funeral
measure map
"organ failure and death" bush torture "new york times"
"navy seal"
newsbusters
revolution america
"Rosa Parks childhood"
"solo journalism"
sony apology 2005 for compromising PC
Visual map of shield law placement

While this feature is a common stat in an analytic tool, the data display isn’t complete:

• Technorati, Icerocket, A9, etc. query hits are listed elsewhere as links
• Image query hits don’t even show up

MM has a cleanly designed interface for displaying terms which originate from specific search engines, but it doesn’t include terms that originate across all search engines. If Technorati, Icerocket, A9, etc. can be presented on the link page, they can just as easily be presented on the Search Engine and Search Terms pages.

MM also differentiates text queries from image queries for no apparent reason. When I pause to see where visitors are coming from and formulate my understanding of why people are coming to my blog, images queries round out the story. Unless there are technical reasons for not presenting all search terms in one section, this should be a no-brainer enhancement.

My Blog Is More Than Just Posts
The number presented in the Posts icon on the homepage doesn’t equate with total page views (a common data point across all analytic services). I understand that Adaptive is trying to keep this simple—reducing page views to post views is one way to do it—but I’m losing visualization of a bunch of data. Here’s the problem:

• When a search result or link to my homepage is followed, MM doesn’t present it alongside my post pages (it’s buried on the most granular Link section interface)
• When a search result or link to a category/tag index page is followed, the same happens as above

Here’s a possible solution for keeping this simple and presenting the most data as possible:

1. Re-label the Posts section to become "Page Views" This basic nomenclature and data point isn’t represented anywhere in MM
2. On the first interface in the new Page View section, present the stats in one table and clearly mark each type of page view with a text or iconic descriptor. Then add a simple widget for choosing: All, Homepage, Categories or Posts.
3. Of course, make it smart to remember which view the user last used
4. Back on the homepage, bubble up the number of posts and categories viewed (out of how many exist) within the large icon, directly under the total number of page views.

Now, at a glance, I’d be able to see my total page views, while also being able to dig deeper and get a sense of which pages are being hit. Simple and powerful.

The United States Of America
I fully realize that the Country section is icing on the average analytic cake, but it is so much more than that within the context of a global perspective. So I’m thrilled to have a tool that visualizes for me where my visitors reside around the globe, while providing a fun geography refresher course. But now I want sweeter icing; I want to know where my visitors are coming from within America.

ESPN.com generates this very view when they present poll returns from around the nation. Yes, this is US-centric, and doesn’t provide a peek into granular levels elsewhere around the world, but if the data is available (which it is) expose it. The zoom feature practically begs for it to be implemented, as I’m dying to see if a rancher in Montana is connecting*the*dots.

I’m really looking forward to the beta release.

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

So it’s Friday night and I find myself cruising around the web after a night out and a tooth brushing away before a night in. In my travels, I landed on JJG’s blog and subsequently stumbled into his Ajax essay on the Adaptive site. I’ve got to admit something; before tonight, I’ve never read one iota about Ajax. The only real conversation I’ve had on the topic was a recent conversation with a client-side developer pal and after reading Jesse’s well defined description of the approach and the benefits. My initial reaction was pretty much, "well, duh!"

I don’t say that to offend Jesse, nor downplay the great client-side work anyone is doing right now, it’s just that I’ve been immersed in online application design for years now and have always tried to communicate these types of solutions to developers. I say "these types of solutions" lightly, as I’m primarily a designer, not a developer, so from my perspective these communication calls have been screaming to be stiched together for a while now. All said, I refuse to rake engineers over the coals. We’re here now.

Jesse spoke to the difficulties of designing online applications due to the technical workarounds which have been historically necessary to successfully support innovative interface behavior. While I agree with the level of difficulty, I disagree with the approach to design, for while practicing interaction design, I don’t model persona scenarios based on technological constraints. As David Fore of Cooper exhorts, the period of scenario modeling should be a period of making magic. That’s how innovation occurs while supporting user needs. I’d much rather engage an engineer in a position to support a brilliant solution than bland, useless features/interface behaviors. So first, come up with the right behaviors, then encourage technology to make it come to life.

Okay, that could come off as a bit pushy, unrealistic and non-tech savvy. One has to understand the constraints of the media when designing for it right? Sure. But not at the cost of potentially handcuffing a more useful experience by limiting possibilities. So how can one design for the user, while considering possibilities of Ajax?

While at Ameritrade, when the opportunity to start the UX Group came my way, I was lucky to be able to convince management to include our relatively small client-side development team in the mix. That brief organizational commitment created a huge opportunity for me to espouse innovation and collaboration across both designers and developers. I didn’t know how long the group structure would last, so I instantly switched up working from the level of context scenarios and began to approach the issue holistically.

We must have used the phrase "push the browser until it pushes back" more times in our weekly staff meetings than "war against terror" has been used in the White House over the past few years. Come hell or highwater, our (paying) client behaviors needed to be supported in our online applications, so in turn, I refused to limit us to any narrow definitions of client-side technology. Thankfully, my CSD guys (and gal) latched onto my mantra with vigor and did the heavy lifting to evolve our conversations into their domain (code), while myself and the IxD’s returned to the iteration of modeling user needs into interface behavior. Did they use the Ajax approach per se? No, but they pretty much pushed the browser until their SOP—which supported the design team’s further pursuit of forward thinking behavioral patterns—is now reflected in some of the latest Ajax app behaviors, such as Gmail. Business as usual of design and development at Ameritrade started to evolve.

Were the solutions as soundly executed across the board as the current Google attempts in leveraging the Ajax approach? I’d have to say no again, as we were performing Ajax-type workarounds on the fly. But the mere fact that the team addressed dynamic interface scenarios on a case-by-case basis, with dynamic executions on the presentation layer, led our marketing group to center their next campaign around the slogan, "Welcome to the 21st Century. Now trade like it." The ripple
effect of the progressive experience design was contained, as it only applied to the authenticated, Apex trading platform, but Barrons seemed to notice it by giving us a 4 star rating (up from 2.5 stars the previous year).

A switch to a complete Ajax approach at Ameritrade today would entail a short period of refactoring, but would make the current authenticated interface move from "singing" to "harmonizing."

As long as the IT politicians and system managers keep their paws out of coding philosophy, Ajax should mark the sweet spot of the golden age of presenting complex scenario relationships as simplified behavioral experience in the browser. Elegance in action. Personally speaking, I just never want to hear "that’s not feasible" again when proposing the design for such a dynamic solution.

Remember Belushi’s reaction to the insipid acuistic guitar love song in Animal House? Exactly.