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Ask HN: Why is Google Analytics’ UI so confusing?

19 points by 2pointsomone ↗ HN
I am an engineer with a management degree (with marketing courses) from a pretty reputed university. I have had a Google Analytics account for several years now. I just finished the Analytics online course. Can somebody please explain to me why the UI of Google Analytics is so extremely confusing and not intuitive at all?

13 comments

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grey-area
Probably because it has grown organically - it may never have been designed at all, but just had details tweaked and features added over the years until it reached its current state. I agree it is very confusing because there are so many features, though I like the real time section and audience overview, which seem pretty clear.

What in particular would you change though? Which metrics do you want to see at a glance which are buried, which things would you like to see on an overall dashboard? It's easy to say something is confusing, but far harder to come up with specific recommendations in order to make it better. This is an area which interests me so I'm genuinely interested in your response.

2pointsomone
Hey thanks! Yeah I don't know. I was considering doing a redesign and putting it in a blogpost - but thinking through this is painful.

I guess I just want to know about how much traffic I am getting everyday, where its coming from, what users are doing when they arrive on the site, and when they leave. I wish I had better ways to explain that.

Avalaxy
You know you can make custom dashboards right? Maybe that will help you out with what you want.
2pointsomone
I have spent all day trying to do that. It seems like I need a PhD in data science to understand the complex UI around all of it.
higherpurpose
That's why I'd rather use the Analytics dashboard (plugin) in Wordpress than go to Google's own web page. Google would do good to learn from it, and provide users a simpler "at a glance" view by default.
jacquesm
Because GA is huge. It's very hard to take something with that much functionality and to package it so that a new user gets a friendly experience and a power user can get out of it what they want. See also: every 3D CAD program, animation software, most IDE's and so on.
2pointsomone
Good point. But have you used Adobe's creativity products? They are massive, but still extremely usable. GA has somehow only paid attention to UI and forgotten all UX issues.
jacquesm
No, I haven't, but my eldest son, who is a designer swears by them.
2pointsomone
They are a piece of beauty when it comes to information design. GA doesn't have a quarter amount of complexity compared to something like Photoshop.
jamez1
If it's not even a quarter as complex as Photoshop, how come it is so hard for you to use?

Comparing a data warehouse tool to a picture editor doesn't lead to any useful insights. The use cases are completely different and the complexities are different animals.

jamez1
It is probably because you're not used to the concept of a data warehouse, and when you are given full control over one it might be beyond your current skill-set.

Engineering/Management don't really do much to teach you how to structure/query data, so perhaps that's why.

2pointsomone
Seriously? The point of making that note was to communicate that I am reasonably intellectual. Analytics is made for normal people. Its like telling someone that the reason they don't understand Facebook is because they are not anthropologists or sociologists.
shazow
I worked on Google Analytics until a year and a half ago, and my impression is that the focus has increasingly been towards sophisticated power users, especially Premium Customers[1] who pay for Google Analytics.

I suspect this creates a dangerous forcing function such that you're designing a product for people who are already strongly committed (by paying a lot of money) and don't really care about what it looks like (because there are entire teams allocated to hack on it, often directly via the API).

Shameless plug: I built https://briefmetrics.com/, it emails you weekly summaries of your Google Analytics so you don't have to navigate the UI. :)

Oh, also check out the official GA mobile app, it's actually a fair bit easier to navigate than the web interface.

[1] https://www.google.com/analytics/premium/