Updates to Your Content View

We spend a lot of time releasing totally new stuff over here. New interfaces, new visualizations, new sources of data. Those are the big ones that capture our imagination.

But the truth is: big ideas are only as good as their execution, and once we get them out in the world we need to reshape them based on what people think and how they actually use them.  That’s how we go turn cool ideas into useful products.

So in that spirit we took a step back and asked people what they thought of our Content View. What did they like? What didn’t they? How could we make it more awesome? And after talking to a bunch of you we, honestly, found a couple of places where we fell down the first time through.

Users thought the Content View didn’t have enough information about who exactly was making up those concurrent visitors, some said it was too hard to quickly understand what content was the biggest, and a couple even said  the page was generally hard to use on small screens. So after considering a comprehensive smear campaign on everyone who didn’t think we nailed it from day one we decided it might be easier to just see if we could make some changes. So with all of that feedback in mind: check out the changes to our Content View.

“I can’t tell where those visitors are coming from.”

When we first launched the new Chartbeat we thought we’d give users one view for your traffic and one for biggest pages, so you could dig really deeply into both. While that was great for deep consideration, it didn’t help you understand what was going on right now super quickly. And fast is kind of our thing.

So this time around, we’ve brought your most important traffic source information right into your content view.

But we know it’s about more than just seeing that they’re coming to the site – it’s knowing what page your visitors are going to. Now you can hover on any traffic source and we’ll show you exactly that. See if your Facebook traffic is going to the page you expect it to or somewhere completely different. Even better – in case you want to know exactly how other websites are talking about you – just click on any of those referring sites and we’ll show you exactly page on that site they’re coming from.

“It’s hard to quickly see which pages are the biggest.”

We wanted the Content view to have an always-changing set of boxes that quickly show which pages were biggest. While this approach looked awesome we heard that it was hard to look at a monitor from across the room and understand how stories were performing in comparison to each other. Totally fair.

So now, in addition to being sorted left-to-right, all the boxes in a row are the same size and the number of concurrent visitors is in big bold text in the upper left. No more mousing around and counting. Just quick insights right away.

And, if you do want to mouse around the page, just hover over the cards. They’ll all pause in their current position so you can scroll around and see what’s up.

“I can’t see enough on my small screen.”

We’ve got big monitors over here and our data tell us most of you have big monitors, too… so sometimes it’s easier to forget about that (exactly) 4.74% of you on screens smaller than our minimum size. But just because you’re not a big group doesn’t mean we ignore your problems. For you, small-screen samurais, we’ve made things more responsive.

Now that big top bar scales down, so on small screens that bar won’t take up most of your screen, it’ll be proportionally the same size as our (even tinier percentage of) users looking at this thing on crazy huge monitors.

That about wraps it up for the Content View Updates. A bunch of changes that aren’t reinventing the way you think about pages and traffic. But a bunch of changes that, hopefully, show you stuff about those things way faster.

I hope it helps, I hope you love it all, and – if you don’t – get at me. There’s so much more of this to come (and some really cool, totally new things just a couple days away, too), and we always want to hear your voice – it’s what makes sure we keep rollin’ out stuff like this on the regular.