User Interface Blog

Yesterday Google Analytics has been relaunched. Brett Crosby, Product Marketing Manager at Google, and Jeff Veen, Design Manager at Google, unveiled the new version of Google Analytics at the Emetrics Summit in San Francisco.

The following screen shot displays the Dashboard of Google Analytics V2.

Here are some improvements as mentioned by the Google Analytics Blog.

• Email and export reports: Schedule or send ad-hoc personalized report emails and export reports in PDF format.
• Custom Dashboard: No more digging through reports. Put all the information you need on a custom dashboard that you can email to others.
• Trend and Over-time Graph: Compare time periods and select date ranges without losing sight of long term trends.
• Contextual help tips: Context sensitive Help and Conversion University tips are available from every report.

The following links present detailed information about Google Analytics V2:

• New Version of Google Analytics!published by by Google Analytics Blog
• What I’ve been working on: The New Google Analytics published by by Jeff Veen
• Google Analytics Is Re-Launched: Do These Five Things First In V2 published by Avinash Kaushik

Today I came across the Web Design from Scratch website maintained by Ben Hunt. He published the excellent Web 2.0 how-to-design guide guide about designing websites containing the Web 2.0 style.

“In this tutorial, I describe various common graphic design elements in modern web (”2.0″) design style. I then attempt to explain why they work (i.e. why they have become common), as well as how, when and where you might use each element in your designs.”

Additionally he presented the Current style in web design article which is interesting to read, too.

“This is where I try to sum up the current state-of-the-art in graphic design for web pages, and identify the distinctive features that make a web page look fresh, appealing and easy to use.”

External Links

• Web 2.0 how-to-design guide
• Current style in web design

Visual-Literacy.org postet a website containing Visualization Methods. It’s a great introduction into the different visualization methods. Move the mouse cursor above the various entries and a sample of the method is displayed.

External Links

• A Periodic Table of Visualization Methods
• Thanks to Christina Wodtke for posting the link.

The User Interface Forum has been updated to a new version. Please let me know if you experience any issues.
http://community.user-interface.org/

Today I had a look at Jensen Harris Office User Interface Blog and read his post about the newly published and royalty-free licensing of the Microsoft Office user interface. There is a lot of discussion about Jennsen’s blog post. Many people raise question about what exactly is licensed: the concept of the ui, new Office look and feel or new code. Others complain that it should not be possible to license the concept of user interface, whereas others think this is a great step forward to publish the standard.

I think that the User Interface Guidelines Preview is interesting to read and that it is full of new ui ideas, approaches and guidelines. I wonder about how much of this will be used by the user interface of new released Microsoft software.

External Links:

• 2007 Microsoft Office System User Interface Licensing web site
• User Interface Guidelines Preview (A short excerpt of the actual guidelines)
• How to misuse the Office 2007 Ribbon
• Being a responsible open source developer

The new Microsft Vista operating system has been released. The Java community has put a lot of work into verifying that it can work correctly on the Vista operating system. For best results you need to use the new major JDK 6 release or if an update is not possible in the given timeframe then you can use the newly released JDK 5 Update 11 release.

The Eclipse community has also done a great job getting SWT on Vista. The latest Eclipse release 3.3 M5 milestone contains SWT updates to ensure it can runs well on the new Vista user interface.

External Links

The new JavaSE 6 has been released. Look at the Top Ten list for information about new features.