By Craig Cartwright, Technical Architect

Well it’s the end of an era for Google Analytics: come end of January 2012 they plan to replace the current interface we have all learnt to love and use with the new dashboard and features that they’ve been promoting for a while (Some may have already jumped shipped to the new interface as we’ve all had the chance for a while to change to the new!).

So what does this actually mean for all of us? And is it time to panic? Well I’d like to think that it’s nothing too serious to worry about, and for most, it will all be fine. But for some of the regular users like me that use some of the more obscure reports, it does mean some annoyance as they are being laid to rest (RIP).

But before running for the hills (or the likes of other great analytics packages such as Mint, etc.) be aware that some of these reports can still be found – but in the strangest of places – namely as “secondary dimensions” or via “advanced segments” for some of the traditional reports. As per the old interface these act as additional “parameters” for filtering reports. For example, the great old screen resolutions reports is now stored/shown as a secondary dimension in the browser report.

So what’s the hype or moan about? Well, with my like for spaghetti westerns – here’s my take on the good, the bad and the plain ugly….

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By , Consultant

At our recent #UsabilityFail seminar Mark Russell and I spoke about why you should stop wasting your marketing budgets on bad usability, covering the functional and organisation barriers that inhibit organisations from providing good online customer experience.

According to a recent report by e-Marketer by 2015 an estimated $51b will be being spent on online marketing each year.

So much money is spent and so much hard work is involved in getting people to your site which is fundamentally wasted if the experiences customers have on your site are poor. You should also be concerned that bad user experiences hurt your brand.

It’s easy to look at sales figures (or whatever success means for you) to quantify how well you are doing. With pride these figures get marched (well, sent) off to the senior management team where everyone pats themselves on the back for a job well done and left with the impression everything is going to plan.

But while this tells a usability story of sorts does this really indicate anything about the usability of the site and how satisfied your customers are with their experience on it?
For many years I worked for a website that failed to address the usability flaws in one of the most popular areas of the site because it provided the “least profit”. Investment was instead piled into those areas that were on paper the “most profitable” even though they were less visited.

This lack of investment where a larger percentage of visitors were most engaged ultimately turned people away from the profitable areas of the site. Why? Does a bad experience resonate with users much more than a good one? You can be certain of it!
We as website users take good usability and experiences for granted and so we should if you want your business to succeed online. Poor usability resonates with us and makes us more likely therefore to leave, complain and never return.

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In this, the second of a six part column contributed by Precedent to PSMG magazine, looks at the best way of learning from you users and their needs.

You know that Friday afternoon feeling, when the To do’ list has been completed (or moved to Monday) but there are still a couple of hours left in the day? Do you get the guilty temptation to nosey on Facebook, Twitter etc? Well go right ahead – in fact make this part of your weekly routine! When your boss asks what you are doing, it’s ‘Digital Ethnography’; the art of hanging out with your customers and prospects online.

Many professional service firms obsess about the design of their site without building any real understanding of their users. Firms expend disproportionate energy on their home page, ignoring the fact that only 25% of users who arrive at their site see this, whilst the rest deep-link to content direct from search. In fact, a user may be making decisions about whether to hire you or your competitor without ever reaching your website.

So how do you better acquaint yourself with your users? Monitor the ‘buzz’; at its simplest this means visiting key forums and social communities regularly and seeing what’s being talked about. Ideally, it means structured review. Free tools such as Social Mention, Social Seek , Boardreader and Klout allow you to monitor keywords across a wide range of social networks and measure your current influence, or deploy one of the heavy hitting enterprise tools such as Sentimetrics or Radian6.

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