15 for 15: Updated UI and Admin Features

Those of you who have read about Site­Cat­a­lyst 15 here and else­where prob­a­bly know a few things about it: we’ve added pow­er­ful seg­men­ta­tion fea­tures, improved report per­for­mance, and made it eas­ier than ever for mar­keters to take con­trol of their imple­men­ta­tions. But not to be totally over­shad­owed are the UI improve­ments and admin fea­tures that we hope will make your life just that much eas­ier. Today I’d like to talk about just some of these changes.

The First One You’ll Notice

It’s hard for me to pick a “favorite usabil­ity improve­ment” from Site­Cat­a­lyst 15, but this one is def­i­nitely in the run­ning. In Site­Cat­a­lyst 14, it often took up to four mouse clicks for you and your users to get to data. You’re not log­ging in to Site­Cat­a­lyst because it’s good for your health (although, for what it’s worth, med­ical research has yet to dis­prove my the­ory that Site­Cat­a­lyst is, in fact, good for you); no, you log in because you want to answer ques­tions using data. In Site­Cat­a­lyst, we’ve made this eas­ier than ever. When you click “Sign In,” you imme­di­ately get this:

What is this? It’s a Site Overview dash­board that comes pre-configured and dis­plays on login unless you have over­rid­den it with a cus­tom land­ing dash­board or report. Right here, your users can begin to answer ques­tions such as:

• How is my over­all site traf­fic trending?
• Which key pages on my site have high and low bounce rate?
• How are vis­i­tors reach­ing my site?

And the best part (in my not-so-humble opin­ion)? Because this is a work­ing dash­board, you can change the date range, the report suite, and the seg­ment at both the entire dash­board level and/or the indi­vid­ual report­let level. With­out leav­ing this dash­board, you can begin your analysis.

And if you don’t like this dash­board, we’ve made it easy for you to change the land­ing page your users will see when they first log in.

Just go to any dash­board and click More Actions > Set As Land­ing Page. Voila. Pat your­self on the back for giv­ing your users exactly what they need in SiteCatalyst.

Change We Can All Believe In

Implicit in my state­ment that you “imme­di­ately get this [Site Overview dash­board]” is the fact that, with Site­Cat­a­lyst 15, we have done away with the “pin­wheel” of prod­ucts shown below. (I know you’re all thrilled, but please hold your applause.)

In addi­tion to adding a click to your work­flow, the pin­wheel was dis­ori­ent­ing and con­fus­ing to many users, who often weren’t sure whether they were sup­posed to choose Site­Cat­a­lyst, or Dis­cover, or Test&Target, or some other prod­uct to get what they needed. Instead, with Site­Cat­a­lyst 15, the Online Mar­ket­ing Suite helps out by auto­mat­i­cally log­ging you in to the land­ing page for the last prod­uct that you used before you logged out. If you were using Site­Cat­a­lyst when you logged out, you’ll be placed in Site­Cat­a­lyst when you log in. Ditto for Search­Cen­ter, Sur­vey, etc. When you want to change prod­ucts, we’ve moved the list to the upper-left cor­ner, where our tests showed that users expected it to be:

All prod­ucts and tools are located here, which means no more dig­ging around for Data Ware­house because it’s buried in a lit­tle drop-down menu to the far right of the prod­uct tool­bar. That upper-left-hand cor­ner is your one-stop shop for every­thing in the Online Mar­ket­ing Suite.

(BONUS: The new prod­uct drop-down menu is actu­ally avail­able in Site­Cat­a­lyst 14, too, although the pin­wheel still exists there, too.)

The VCU of Site­Cat­a­lyst 15

If you’re not an fan of Amer­i­can col­lege bas­ket­ball, this anal­ogy may be lost on you. (When I used it dur­ing inter­nal train­ings, I got—at best—pity laughs.) Vir­ginia Com­mon­wealth Uni­ver­sity, or VCU, was a mostly unheard-of team that made a shock­ing run to the Final Four this past March. In other words, they were a lit­tle group of scrappy under­dogs whom nobody pre­dicted would do much in the tour­na­ment, but who ulti­mately shocked us all and cap­tured our appre­ci­a­tion. This next fea­ture is kind of like that. It seemed lit­tle when our devel­op­ment team added it, but cus­tomers have responded to it in a big way, let­ting us know how much eas­ier this is going to make their lives, and the lives of their users, in Site­Cat­a­lyst 15.

At the top of the left nav­i­ga­tion menu in Site­Cat­a­lyst 15 you will find a text box where you can enter a search string.

As you type, the list of avail­able reports whit­tles itself down to include only report names that match your search. If you needed to give some­one direc­tions in Site­Cat­a­lyst 14, you had to say some­thing like this: “Okay, Fred, go to the Cus­tom Con­ver­sion menu, then go to Cus­tom Con­ver­sion 1–10, then go to Prod­uct Find­ing Methods.”

You can now sim­ply say, “Okay, Fred, just type ‘Prod­uct Find­ing Meth­ods’ into the text box, then go to the only option avail­able to you!”

Hope­fully, gone are the days of scour­ing through lists of hun­dreds of reports to find the one that you want. As long as you know the name—or even part of the name—you can get to it in a mat­ter of a few seconds.

You can also search through your list of dash­boards and book­marks in a sim­i­lar way, using the search field under “Favorites” on the left nav­i­ga­tion menu. No more scan­ning through thou­sands of dashboards!

Ban Irrel­e­vant Metrics!

Is there any­thing worse than going to a Cus­tom Con­ver­sion report and see­ing Rev­enue as the default met­ric when Rev­enue makes no sense in that report? Maybe your site doesn’t even record rev­enue as a met­ric, or maybe it just sim­ply is out of con­text in the given report. Of course, we could be talk­ing about any met­ric; the point is that, until now, you have often had to load up a report, then remem­ber to change the met­ric in order to get data you can use. Sure, you could change the default met­rics at the report suite level, but that’s less than ideal when cer­tain met­rics are rel­e­vant in some places but not others.

Site­Cat­a­lyst 15 intro­duces the con­cept of default met­rics on indi­vid­ual reports. In any report where you can select met­rics, admin-level users will have a lit­tle arrow next to the “Add Met­rics” but­ton. When you click this arrow, you will have the option to set the cur­rent set of met­rics as default for the cur­rent report only. It doesn’t affect other reports or report suites; all users of that report will see the met­rics you choose.

I can set Rev­enue, Vis­its, and Add To Reg­istry as my default met­rics in one report, and then set Leads Gen­er­ated, Prod­uct Views, and Unique Vis­i­tors as my default met­rics in another report. You (and your users) should never have to see “No Data” mes­sages due to irrel­e­vant met­rics again! This will lead to much less con­fu­sion due to strange com­bi­na­tions of data dimen­sions and met­rics in Site­Cat­a­lyst, and much faster/easier report­ing and analysis.

The Ninth-Ranked Idea on the Idea Exchange

This fea­ture is for admin users only, but it’s worth men­tion­ing to every­body. One rea­son I want to men­tion it is that it some­how became the ninth most pro­moted idea on the Idea Exchange. Admins can now go to Admin > User Man­age­ment and see exactly which users are logged into Adobe Dis­cover for their com­pany, along with the last action per­formed by these users within Dis­cover. If nec­es­sary, admin users can kill cur­rent Dis­cover ses­sions if they need to reclaim a float­ing license for some imme­di­ate need.

No more wait­ing in a queue if you have an insa­tiable desire to get into Dis­cover imme­di­ately (or, you know, if you need an answer for a key meet­ing begin­ning in three min­utes… or whatever).

The Fea­ture For­merly Known As “Impersonate”

(We thought “Imper­son­ate” sounded too creepy.)

Last but cer­tainly not least is an admin fea­ture that also came highly pro­moted via the Idea Exchange: the abil­ity for admin users to log in to Site­Cat­a­lyst as their non-admin users with­out requir­ing the users’ pass­words. We’re call­ing it “Log In As User.”

There are a num­ber of uses for this fea­ture, such as help­ing your non-admin users set up reports and dash­boards on their own account, val­i­dat­ing that per­mis­sions are work­ing as you expect, and more. We wanted to empower our admin users to sup­port their orga­ni­za­tions in every pos­si­ble way, and this was a key com­po­nent as sug­gested by the 37 votes this one received in the Idea Exchange. (In case you’re con­cerned about shenani­gans, have no fear; we are log­ging every action taken while you’re logged in as one of your non-admin users. These logs are avail­able in the Admin Console.)

Con­clu­sion

As I men­tioned at the begin­ning of this post, these are only some of the things we’ve done to improve usabil­ity and admin func­tion­al­ity in Site­Cat­a­lyst 15. (For exam­ple, should I talk about the vastly improved action tool­bar at the top of reports? I will not. But it’s cool.) We hope you will enjoy these fea­tures and many oth­ers not described here. Please let us know what you like (and don’t like?) about the new Site­Cat­a­lyst UI. We have done a tremen­dous amount of work to respond to your usabil­ity feed­back already, and we’re cer­tainly not done yet.

As always, if you have any ques­tions about any­thing in this post, or about any­thing else related to the Adobe Online Mar­ket­ing Suite, please leave a com­ment here or con­tact me on Twit­ter and I’ll do my best to get you the infor­ma­tion that you need.