Instant Pretty Stats! Visual.ly Turns Your Google Analytics Into Infographics

-
spydey vs Rainn
If you're a fan of Visual.ly infographics, then you know how wonderfully simple, colourful and easy to understand they can be. And even if you have never hired them to custom-make a graphic for you, you might have used their fun tools to create your own.

Like, for instance, this lovely graphic on the right which pairs yours truly in a head-to-head Twitter showdown with none other than one @RainnWilson. That's right, I'm taking on the uber nerd from the Office to answer one of life's most important questions: do we tweet on the same day at the same time? (Spoiler: no) And who has the better follow ratio? (Spoiler: me) (Granted, he has A THOUSAND TIMES more followers than I do but you know, whatevs.) 

They offer a bunch of layouts and story options, all you have to do is give up your privacy connect one of your social media accounts, and they mine the data to create the graphic automagically. Now, I did find that the data they mine doesn't go that far always go that far back in time, so some of the results have to be taken with a grain of salt. I tried a Twitter history, and I swear it only used the last few hundred or thousand tweets. Given that I have 35,000 tweets and counting, the resulting image really didn't paint a comprehensive picture. It did however have a flashy kewl factor that made it fun (not to be taken too seriously).

Visual.ly has added an appealing new service though, which could be very useful to those of us who work on the Web and are responsible for reporting on client engagement and site use on a regular basis: they have added the ability to pull stats directly from Google Analytics and auto-generate infographics. Let me reiterate: you can connect Visual.ly to your GA account and every week it will send you a highly stylized infographic depicting your site usage and engagement. And it will include comparisons of your current week to previous weeks, in order to track trends in some of the key metrics.

Here's a sample visual of the engagement metrics portion of my graphic from this week:


And here's a look at a complete sample infographic:

Click to enlarge
This could be a really handy way of keeping tabs on week-to-week changes in traffic on your site. Especially during short term communications or promotional blitzes such as ad campaigns. However...

A word of caution

Now, being a good little metrics person, I absolutely need to caution you about the usage of these infographics: The collection of numbers being reported is by no means complete. And, much like my complaint about the social infographics I played with and mentioned above, this diagram really only portrays a very small part of the story. 

Mainly, because it is missing the entire "Why" factor. 

Using only a graphic like this to perform your weekly reporting would be (dare I say it) irresponsible. However, I will say that it could be a great way to supplement your weekly reporting, as long as you chop it up and integrate it with the appropriate narrative. That's right, I said chop it up. Because you and I both know that these infographics are far too pretty, simple and tantalizing: the minute you put them into circulation, everything else gets ignored. Take it apart and mix it in with your detailed analysis of what's going on behind the numbers to tell the whole story of what's going on with your site.

(Source: The Next Web)

Popular posts from this blog

Designing the team experience: Building culture through onboarding (Slides from PPPConf, Chicago 2018)

-
Image
On Thursday, August 9, 2018, I delivered a presentation on team culture at the Prototypes, Process and Play conference in Chicago.

My presentation was a case study of an enterprise project where onboarding was not a priority and the project was a giant mess. Meanwhile, the little sub-team that I was on paid a lot of attention to designing the team member experience, including onboarding, and in turn ended up developing a reusable process for designing the team member experience.

My takeaways were:
Your team is an element of your project that needs to be designed. If you don’t build onboarding into your processes, people can get lost along the way.In UX, when you don't design the team member experience, you sacrifice the experience of your people for the experience of your users.Help new hires become part of the team and set them up to be productive contributors. Create a ramp-up process to show new hires how their work will make an impact.Establish and share your project folklore e…
Read more

UX Theatre: Are You Just Acting Like You're Doing User-Centered Design?

-
Image
Back in January, I wrote a Twitter thread about projects that pay lip service to user-centered design (UCD) and what we can do about it as designers. Here's an expanded write-up of the topic, for those of you who requested some additional context. (The original tweets are in italics.)

A few projects I've come across recently are doing UX theatre, not actual user-centered design. Sadly, it's becoming more prevalent as execs learn the term UX but their teams aren't empowered to do all the work that UX entails.
Organizations have latched on to "user-centered design" as a buzzword. In many cases, executives seem to misinterpret it as a euphemism for "thinking from a user's perspective." They don't fund user research or provide project owners the latitude to create teams that include UX and service designers. For all the talk about users, there is no consideration given to including them in the design and delivery process.

People pepper their pres…
Read more

UX Theatre: The Poster

-
Image
In January 2018, I wrote a Twitter thread about how some user experience projects tend to pay lip service to user-centered design rather than being actual user-centered design. I used the term "UX Theatre" to describe the phenomenon. Based on the reaction online, it seems that this is a common occurrence across the industry. People responded with emotional reactions, sharing their own UX Theatre stories, and thanking me for putting a label on it.

I followed up in March 2018 with a more fullsome blog post, UX Theatre: Are You Just Acting Like You're Doing User-Centered Design? which added more detail and examples to the tweetstorm.

This year, I created a poster which details the issue, lists symptoms, and provides actionable recommendations that we, as UX practitioners or leaders, can use to help prevent or correct UX Theatre. I presented it at the Information Architecture Conference 2020 Poster Night, and invited people to stop by and tell me their UX Theatre stories. It…
Read more