This week marks the wide release of our Historical Dashboard, a major collaborative effort between our own product, engineering, and data science teams — and you, our users.

From user interviews to NPS surveying and beta-testing, we made sure that our users were at the center of development efforts. With your help, we’ve now added a host of new historical data features and reporting capabilities for you to explore, and plan to continue enriching this framework with insights that benefit you and your team.

If you pull up your Historical Dashboard, you’ll instantly see many of the new features we’ve added. Cross-dashboard linking provides a comprehensive view of content performance across historical and real-time datasets, and pivots let you drill down into key audience and traffic segments. Flexible CSV export options and responsive design make sharing details of top-performing stories easier than ever.

Some of those features were easy to prioritize: “After releasing the beta version of historical, [the ability to filter by audience segments] was our most commonly requested feature,” says George Bixby, Design Director. Editors told George and the other members of our team that they needed to be able to look back at how they succeeded in reaching different audience types, as well as clearly compare the types of content that each audience engaged with.

Sharing details of top-performing stories [is now] easier than ever.

Other features were prioritized based on observing user behavior, and helping the product better integrate within existing user workflows. “We saw that folks were accessing their Historical Dashboards on their mobile devices via our Reports, so we made the design responsive.” says Tom McGurl, Front-End Engineer and technical lead on the project.

As with all development, the general release involved more finesse than building a list of feature requests — including balancing new features and existing benefits. “Users like the Historical Dashboard because it’s fast,” says Ani Shahinyan, Product Manager. “We wanted to ensure that we could make it even better without compromising response time.”

Given the requirement to serve up data quickly, the technical work was a unique challenge. “Pulling all of that data can sometimes be complex,” Tom remembers. “We made some optimizations to ensure we can serve customers the data they need in a fast and seamless way.” Armed with its new features, the Historical Dashboard continues to deliver precise segments of data to users at top speed.  

“Users like the Historical Dashboard because it’s fast,” says Ani Shahinyan, Product Manager.

But just because it’s now released widely doesn’t mean we’re done listening to feedback — especially regarding user experience. Tell us what you think, and what we could do next for your historical data needs! As George says, Chartbeat will always be about “growing our capability to answer the increasingly complex questions our customers have about their data, and surfacing the insights that we believe, based on our own data, could be useful for our customers to see.”

Take the spiffed-up Historical Dashboard for a spin — we hope you enjoy.

— Edited by Chris Consroe, with contributions from Ani Shahinyan, Tom McGurl, and George Bixby.