I’ve been hearing about and working with Engaged Time since my very first day at Chartbeat, in early February. As our key metric, Engaged Time fuels a ton of what we do – it shapes conversations with our user-influencers, inspires new product and features concepts – and it instigates dialogues with industry data wonks. We talk about it a lot, as you probably have noticed, and Engaged Time is woven into our thought leadership as well as into all of our products.

So when I was given the opportunity to add Engaged Time into the Chartbeat Publishing Heads Up Display last week, of course I jumped at the occasion.

Incorporating Engaged Time is part of three awesome, major changes we made to the Heads Up Display. These upgrades make the product easier to use and give you more of the information you need, when you need it.

1. First, as I mentioned previously, say hello to Engaged Time in the Heads Up Display. We’ve incorporated Engaged Time into both the Details Window and the Top Ten Link list. In addition to having the Engaged Time for any given link, we show you how that story’s Engaged Time ranks in relation to the other top links on the page.

2. The next major change you’ll notice is the three distinct detail window sizes. Each window size represents the amount of information that we have available for a given link.

• Small indicates that the link probably just started receiving clicks, so we’re just starting to collect data on that story.

• Medium means the link has recently changed positions, and while we have historical data for the link, we are just beginning to get enough data about its new context.

• A large window means that there is enough data collected for this link at its respective position that we can confidently tell you how it performs compared to links in that same position historically.

If you ever need more information, it can be obtained via the info button on each of the smaller windows.

3. Lastly, we doubled the maximum number of pins from 40 to 80 (so we’re now collecting data on your top 80 links) and the maximum page height from 1500px to 3000px. This means that our users will have access to more information directly from the Heads Up Display and will now have more coverage for those longer homepages. More data, more coverage, more happy homepage editors :).

Check out our Heads Up Display demo to see the changes for yourself – of course I’d love your feedback on these changes, and I’m always looking for insights from our users. Feel free to post your ideas in the Comments section.

What else do you think should be added to the Heads Up Display? What should we build next?

PS – Stay tuned for an upcoming weekly blog post series about my experiences as a new engineer at Chartbeat!