Handsome Stats: beautiful snapshot of your Google Analytics | Hacker News Reader

Handsome Stats: beautiful snapshot of your Google Analytics

handsomestats.com

35 pointsnreece21 comments

Three design suggestions:

1. Pie charts need to die in a fire. I'm Tuftian like that. :)

2. The "scratched" fill on the bars makes it really hard to "read" them; solid colour would be much much better in my opinion.

3. I don't think bars are a good choice to display developments over time (for a non-discrete domain, if you will). I think line charts are much better, but you could probably get the best of both worlds by combining both visualizations into one.

Please don't take this the wrong way, but I am not blown away by the design. d3.js has really spoilt me in raising the bar so high like that, but I am sure that your general demographic will find it fine. Still, it might be worth to draw some inspiration by some of Bostock's blocks at http://bl.ocks.org/mbostock.

.05. :)

We tried something about 3 years ago that (presumably) addresses the same problem.

The feedback on HN back then was similar, especially the frequent mentions of GA custom dashboards.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1499018 (just for reference, the service is _not_ operational)

At one point we started asking people we were presenting the product to to put together a GA custom report that's comparable in terms of setup time and output format. To this day I've not heard of anyone actually pulling it off.

HN is not your target audience for this. Hopefully you've already realized that. Your market is the massive amount of Google Analytics installations that remain completely unused because people can't be bothered with the details. Yet these people are interested in stats about their websites.

I'd be interested about how the "per report" pricing is working out, at first glance it seems a bit steep.

Good luck.

> just for reference, the service is _not_ operational

Your product looks really interesting and it sounds like you got some traction. What happened, if you don't mind sharing?

People really need to stop referring to their own work as "beautiful". Show, don't tell. If you make something truly beautiful, other people will say it for you. You can even quote them if you want. But you don't need to say it yourself.

Oh please, it's just marketing copy. If someone puts the time and hard work in to launch a product, there's nothing wrong with talking it up a bit to draw attention. Your comment is pointlessly negative.

Negativity is bad.Constructive criticism is good.

This isn't a particularly good moment to weild this cliche. The core value proposition here is that it re-presents your data more beautifully than google analytics itself. Unlike the examples from which your cliche arose, this isn't bragging so much as a statement of purpose.

I agree with you there, and was thinking about that after making the comment. Any thoughts on how they could have gotten that across equally effectively without explicitly saying, "We're Google Analytics, except beautiful?" Honestly, maybe this particular case was fine, and they're not to be blamed for the fact that the cliche rubs off on them negatively. On the other hand, maybe they need to recognize that because of the cliche, some people - like me - will have negative or mixed reactions to their use of the word, even if it's otherwise wholly appropriate.

Seems like a great way to get access to a lot of Google Analytics accounts. I'd be a wanting something more substantial than "beauty" to give away that info.

While it's eye candy, it doesn't really add any value over GA custom dashboards, and shows mostly vanity metrics.

Excellent, just what I wanted :)

I don't think that GA is "hard" so much that it's "vast". The average HNer is fine with this complexity, but the average person with a GA account is not, so kudos to this team for taking a crack at it.

While custom dashboards in GA can be helpful, I've had more than my fair share of clients that want a place that they can see the "Top 3" things they should be paying attention to along with an explanation of why. Usually, this involves comparison of stats over the last period (whether month or year).

I think GA is a great tool, but they do a bad job of hiding things from people until they want to dig in. They present most of the information up front, but with no context.

Setting up goals and knowing why something is "bad" vs. "good" is an educational hurdle for (likely) the vast majority of GA users, not HNers. I wonder if there's a tool that let's someone annotate directly on the stats... and I'm not talking about notes in GA.

The lack of labels on the axes of graphs actually makes it harder for me to read them, not easier.

"Less is more" is too often misunderstood..

http://xkcd.com/833/

I don't really understand why people think Google Analytics is hard to use. When it comes to basic statistics that this example site illustrates, I think it's extremely easy to use Google Analytics.

While it's easy to use, it can be a little...clunky at times. I'd be interested in seeing someone design a more streamlined interface over a more beautiful one.

I don't think it's a good idea to base your business around a Google service.

Who knows what they will decide to arbitrarily shutdown in a few weeks time?

I think it's worth considering the massive hurdle of making people replace their GA script code with one of your own. It's a hard battle that I think it makes sense not to pick, unless you really feel up for the challenge.

The value proposition is the design, and you could always offer it as an optional choice - that you might force users to replace the GA-based script with at a later point.

I love it. I would definitely pay for this service if the value was more reasonable. Good luck!

Lack of info on the report is making this thing useless.

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