Noel Perlas - Perlas Design Studio » Usability

The problem with web software

noelperlas — Wed, 21 Feb 2007 10:22:41 +0000

Flickr was down for a couple hours a couple of days ago. They had problems with caching. So a lot of people’s photos were showing “phantom photos” or photos of other people on their photo library. It happened to my photos too (see screenshot).. the thumbnails were different from the actual photo. Some of them were even, as Via commented, scary looking. And recently there have been reports of comment spam on some users.

This is not an attack on Flickr, they actually handled it quite well and fast. They also still kept their sense of humor even in times like these. Their error message wrote “Flickr is having a massage,” which I think everyone should have once in a while.

This is more of a warning on using web software. There has been a lot of web services lately that not only store blogs, photos, videos or non-critical information.. but also critical ones like big files, schedules, spreadsheets, financial information and documents. Not all of them have the same resource as Yahoo (flickr) or Google. Sometimes its better to stick to your local system. So, in my opinion, Google taking over MS Office is still quite far away.

Reinvigorate (your metrics)

noelperlas — Wed, 14 Feb 2007 12:03:48 +0000

A couple of weeks ago, I got an invitation to beta test this newish site metrics web software. I’m not sure if this was the same one, but I tried reinvigorate before. And back then they were still tracking site traffic but by using flash.. or embedding a flash code inside your flash sites. Which made sense back then where there was no way of knowing which page within your flash site the user was going to. But with the emergence of blogs, “webtwopointoh” sites and new measurement sites like Google Analytics and Mint. I guess reinvigorate felt it needed a reboot.

I assume that reinvigorate needed some buzz about their product which is why they invited me and they won’t mind me posting some screenshots of their interface. So after using it for a couple of weeks, here are my “first impressions.” I’ll try not to compare this with the slew of other tracking systems I’ve used.

All your metrics in one place. Reinvigorate allows you to track multiple sites. You can make your own categories or groupings. This is great, no more going to different URLs to fetch for each of your sites.

Mmmm.. graphs galore. If you are into information graphics, you’ll like the eye candy of these graphs. I am one of those junkies, but I still find some of them too abstract or sometimes too meaningless. But I haven’t been using the site that long, maybe these graphs may come in handy someday when my site has a billion hits and earning me thousands of dollars! Haha.

Lots of choices… lots to click. Gosh it does get too overwhelming at times when I just want to see how many people visited this week. There is an overview page, but it shows only active visitors and active pages. Good if you’re site is frequented by thousands a second. Bad if when you look at it all you see are Zeros! I would’ve wanted an option to customize my overview page.

Maps and Timezones. I love how they rendered the map and the timezone but I still feel there is room for some improvement in terms of what information it shows. By looking at a map, I want to know which country views my sites the most and how many people from that country visited at a certain period of time.

Referred Visitors. This is one feature I got pleasantly surprised with. I like how it shows where visitors come from along with the summary of their browsers and systems. As you can see here there are exactly 1 return visitors from my other site (noeluvia.com) Yes 1 is a sad number to see.. specially beside that zero!
Reinvigorate comes at a good time for me as my current analytics software (mint) just had an upgrade and I am not yet willing to shell out another $19 for it when I had just bought a $30 license last December. There is no indication in the site if this is going to be a paid service or free one (oh please let it be free.. or let someone buy them to keep it free)

Damn I missed that?

noelperlas — Fri, 05 Jan 2007 08:08:48 +0000

For a couple of days now I’ve been wondering if why my Mint installation doesn’t seem to be tracking traffic well. I added a Performancing Metrics tracker, thanks to mr. paraz’s recommendation, to the site and it seemed more accurate than Mint. Unfortunately, Performancing Metrics will no longer be in development.
I didn’t really read any manuals for Mint, if there is any. I didn’t think I needed to. It should work right out of the box right?

I still don’t know if things will change, but I just saw this selection in Mint and just figured out what it meant. See for yourself:

After installation, these were at default “unwatched” or in this case “+”. Why is that? Shouldn’t all pages be watched? Then let the user decide later what not to watch? The iconography didn’t help me at all. I just got more confused.

I ran into a similar problem with an administrator site before. How do you make an icon show the status and yet also indicate an action to be made at the same time? In my case I had to show that this person is a “special” and by clicking on the icon, you can make the person “not special” anymore. It was a hard language to set. I ended up using a STAR with a MINUS sign to indicate that this person was special and by clicking on the icon you can make him “not special.” Still a bit confusing I know.

Update: It seems like this was not the problem that was causing my Mint installation not to work. It was because of the plug-in (or Pepper) called Location which cause the bug to occur. But I am keeping this post since the usability issue is still an important one.