
Handsome Stats: beautiful snapshot of your Google Analytics - nreece
http://www.handsomestats.com
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kmfrk
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](http://bl.ocks.org/mbostock).

.05. :)

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timme
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](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.

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ericabiz
> 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?

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tempestn
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.

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danenania
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.

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kumarski
Negativity is bad.Constructive criticism is good.

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tomthorns
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.

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

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spacec0wb0y
Excellent, just what I wanted :)

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thecosas
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.

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

~~~
antiheld1n
"Less is more" is too often misunderstood..

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riquito
[http://xkcd.com/833/](http://xkcd.com/833/)

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buremba
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.

~~~
erinbryce
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.

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ngwea
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?

~~~
kmfrk
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.

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

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

