Google has announced the launch of Google Analytics v2 and it represents a significant step forward in web analytics. Under the leadership of Jeff Veen of earlier Adaptive Path and MeasureMap fame, the new Google Analytics leverages Veen's insights into the value of simplicity and data visualization and brings them to Google portfolio.
The user experience is crisp, clean and intuitive. With Jeff Veen now leading a design team at Google responsible for over-hauling Google's web application user experience - including GMail, Calendar, Google Apps, GTalk and others - the launch of Analytics v2 represents a leading indicator of how their new web apps will evolve.
Here's an example of the GA dashboard...
And from the official Google Blog, Jeff summarizes:
"We started over a year ago with dozens of interviews with power users, those new to analytics, and everyone in between. They told us they needed their data organized in a more intuitive way. They wanted to be able to see traffic trends in context with more explanation of what the numbers mean. And they needed tools to help them communicate what they'd found with others. This research fed months of development and design iteration to create a totally new user experience."
We should fully expect that this GA launch serves as a prelude to new Google Apps interfaces that make it easy for the user to find, analyze and share information across the google suite of web applications. This launch is as much a signal about Google user experience design and development as it is about web analytics.
Avinash Kaushik offers an interesting summary of the Google Analytics launch and its impact on the web analytics space.
"One more of most dramatic changes to Google Analytics V2 is the new immersive data interaction model. It sets a new benchmark for how users interact with data. It shifts the model from a few digging long and hard to find insights to the many not having to dig a lot to find first blush insights and also having the power to easily and quickly dig deeper if they want to.
The V2 UI is completely new and the center piece of this launch. Every where from totally customizable dashboards to the overview reports to the presentation of the data and more “stories” that go with the reports now."
It will be interesting to watch how:
(a) Omniture, WebTrends, WebSideStory and other web analytics players respond
(b) Microsoft responds to the anticipated web apps changes across the Google Apps portfolio
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