User experience has had its share of the spotlight at SXSW. Major leaps forward in the thinking around user cenetered design, web standards, and design methodology have launched from SXSW panels from some of the biggest names in the web design industry. All of the previous presentations have shared one thing in common: they focus on designing from scratch. Launching brand new products or designing marketing campaign materials present UX challenges for agencies and entrepreneurs; but what about those of us that work for software companies? What UX direction do we have to follow when we inherit legacy designs with large installed user bases?

Creating a new user experience within an established software brand is not easy and not the same as starting from a blank page. It is like redesigning a train while it’s in motion. Over the course of the last year, I’ve been working as the Director of User Experience at Webtrends. Our latest releases have been met with fanfare and have attracted new users. This hasn’t been easy.

Lessons I learned:

• Learning to love a design that isn’t yours, warts and all
• Choosing what to evolve and what to leave as is
• Finding the right methodology to rally the team around
• Learning what users feel empowered by and what they are frustrated with
• Prototype early and test
• Finding the essential user patterns

I think this information is invaluable for anyone that is joining an established brand or is inheriting a design from someone else. I’ve submitted a session/panel at SXSW to reveal the process at Webtrends, what worked and what didn’t work. Why SXSW? If you never been, it is the most amazing, chaotic, incredible meet-up in the interactive world.

If you are interested in this panel, or feel that others would benefit, please vote for it today. We only have a week of voting left!

If you plan on going to SXSW, I hope to see you there.

There are three things you will see very little of when using the new Insight interface. Navigation, color, and data visualization. In fact, their absence or minimal use is integral to the Insight design. The key was to stay focused on our goal of providing an innovative new view to powerful data.

A phrase from Garth Stein’s The Art of Racing in the Rain captures the heart of this methodology:

“That which you manifest is before you.”

That is, if you see a spoon, there is a spoon. If you focus on the left navigation, your design will center around the left nav. If you start with color, your design will hinge on color. If you see flash as the solution, your design will rely heavily on it.

Realizing this we set about designing the Insight user experience deliberately leaving out large pieces of the puzzle.

Color

The absence or presence of color can drastically effect the feel of a design. In general, the world of infographics and analytics is filled with color. By deliberately leaving out color we were able to ensure that what color we did have made an impact. In the Insight interface color has very specific meaning

Even in this very small image of the Account Dashboard you can see areas that need attention because of their red color. The red stands out because there are no other colors to compete with it. We also use blue through out the interface to indicate interactivity. Of course, this doesn’t mean the Insight interface will always remain devoid of color. It just means we will be judicious about when and where we add it.

Left Navigation

Now, the left navigation or “left-nav” as we call it in the biz, has been around since the inception of the internet. Early web sites were almost uniformly L-shaped and it became somewhat of a standard. I can remember regarding the L-shape as a usability enhancement because people knew how to use it and would easily recognize it as the place they needed to go for navigation. After all, inertia is a powerful thing and there is tremendous advantage in using standards and patterns that are widely adopted. You don’t want to reinvent the wheel.

However, in our case we wanted the data to be navigation. We knew that we would probably have to include some sort of global navigation at some point but we knew that leaving it out would force us to find other ways to guide the user through the interface. The very interesting thing is that in the end we discovered we didn’t need navigation at all, at least in the form of a left navigation element.

Instead, elements like the breadcrumb style navigation allow users to quickly pivot between profiles and reports. It also acts as a title for each report. The report list at the bottom of the Profile Dashboard allows the user to see all their reports easily. The search field allows them to filter the list in order to find a report by name.

Data Visualization

There are many great examples of great visualizations that can really wow your users. 3D Spinning Scatterplots, gauges, and pie charts can be really impressive. Historically, dashboards are littered with a myriad of data visualizations, but if you really understand the data you realize that many of the visualizations actually obscure the insight. Inspired by Steven Krug’s Don’t Make Me Think we sought to minimize any need to interpret data.

Technology can also heavily influence the design. With Flash, Canvas, Processing, and even Corda the possibilities are endless. Because we remained agnostic to the technology we were able to focus on the RIGHT visualizations for the data. In the end, we chose Canvas because it allowed us to use web standards and did not limit the devices we could work on.

In the future, we may use Processing or Flash or whatever new data visualization technology is available. The important thing is that we will use them to create visualizations that provide instant insight in to the meaning of the data.

By approaching design in this way you get a clear focus on the core concept of your design. If you can remain committed and brave the slings and arrows of those who insist on navigation or poke fun at your monochromatic color palette, the end result is a much more compelling user experience that is focused on what your audience needs. It may even have a strong navigational element and every color in the rainbow but instead of dominating the user interface they will exist only to support the key focus of the design.

Jeff Katz recently sent me a link to a post from a blogger complaining about the state of technology in social media monitoring. While I agree with many of the points in the post about the challenges of the industry, I was very put off by the insulting manner the blogger used. I was also surprised to see how many start ups in the social media monitoring space seemed to just learn the challenges of the market.

In a comment string on that post, Ari Herzog asked me to elaborate on this point: “If you think the amount of person hours spent using the current systems is a lot now, just wait for what is coming.” So, this is that elaboration.

Staffing up

Jeremiah Owyang will be the first to tell you that he doesn’t think social media scales. He’ll also point you to Best Buy as an example of a company to watch. Have you seen their Twitter background for their @Twelpforce account? It’s an army of people. Best Buy is doing something unique: they’re solving the volume of conversation with, gasp, people!

Most of the business interest in social media has been around marketing. As a social media marketer, I know it’s only a part of the long term business value of social media. The truth is social media is a communication channel, which plugs into every business department just like email and phone. Speaking of phones, former CEO of Zappos.com now acquired by Amazon.com, Tony Hsieh said, “We don’t really think of social media as a marketing channel; that would be kind of like asking about ROI on answering phones.”

Having started by building social media programs with systems that I rolled myself to building out a global social media program for Webtrends; I can say that a big realization has emerged from what Jeremiah and Tony have been talking about. Businesses need to think about social media as a communication channel. They should be planning for it and evaluating it using similar KPIs as they do their phones. It’s not a question of if they should talk to customers, prospects, partners, etc. The question is how efficiently they’re doing it.

However, that’s not what businesses are currently thinking or doing. Most businesses are still sticking their toe in the water of social media and as a result have seriously under invested in the space. Large Fortune 1000 companies are gripping about spending $30K on software and handing it over to super small teams–sometimes a single person. Can you imagine if they tried to answer their phone lines with a 3 person team? Or a single intern?!! How can they expect to evaluate performance when the team is so under water that they can’t even think?

The reality is that if businesses want to be successful in participating in social media, they’ll need to allocate resources in proportion to the volume that exists for their brand. Small companies can get away with small teams. Large corporations will need large departments. They will be structured like call centers with IVRs, scripts, answer trees, etc. It will take a substantial investment in staff training, infrastructure, and rolling out business processes. Everyone in the company will have to know how to use the tools and different departments will be responsible for different pieces of the conversation.

There is wide spread confusion about how much to invest and how to measure value. To help, Forrester or someone should do a study comparing the amount of conversation hours large brands have on phones, email, and social media. That would help businesses understand the relative investment to make. It would also help them determine which channels are most efficient so they can push conversations to their most efficient channels. We’re deploying a cross-departmental, multi-channel, global social media program here and we plan to share the details for our customers’ reference.

During the previous four parts of this series( intro, paper prototyping, design, and web standards), I focused on the redesign of Tag Builder that we completed in the spring. While authoring these posts, I didn’t have the liberty to disclose the application we launched just last week, Webtrends Analytics 9 Insight. However, these posts were not unrelated as the methodologies and principles that guided the redesign of Tag Builder were also core to the genesis of Analytics 9 Insight. In the final post in this series, I’ll introduce Analytics 9 Insight features that were inspired by working directly with our users as we progressed through designing, building and testing.

Stories

For the past year, we have been collecting stories from our customers. While listening to what is currently working for them, we paid special attention to what isn’t. We found that our pro users spent a majority of their time creating dashboards and reports for other users in the organization, from executives to marketers. These other users greatly outnumbered the pro users and found that the Webtrends interface was difficult to navigate and had too many options. We incorporated this feedback into stories that guided our design and development.

Some of the stories that guided Analytics 9 Insight

Prototyping and User Testing

Working from these stories, we prototyped the new application completely on paper, using a process called paper prototyping. A cross-departmental team made up of designers, developers, writers, testers, and others “built” the application with markers, paper, scissors, and tape. We then took the paper prototype on the road to our customer conference in Las Vegas. There, we had multiple sessions where our customers attempted to accomplish tasks derived from our stories. When they succeeded, we knew we got it right. When they didn’t, we broke out the markers and paper and designed new solutions. In the end, the paper prototype became a blueprint for our design and development efforts.

David working on some paper prototypes before testing with users

Beta

We developed the application in just nine weeks. We wanted to get it in the hands of users as soon as possible, initially releasing it into a private beta so we could gather feedback and address issues before releasing it publicly. It was a great thing to do because it gave us the opportunity to fine tune the performance and remove many issues before launching the application to the entire On Demand user base.

White board used to track key issues during the private beta

Launch

We were all a bit nervous as we launched the product. It was exciting to see the activity on Twitter and the early reviews pour in. Our goal was to make the most intuitive, useful analytics application in the industry, but because the stories that guided our design efforts came directly from our customers, we were also confident. To keep the dialog going, we included a Get Satisfaction link right in the product. We want to continue to hear from our users.

Get Satisfaction feedback built into the product

New Features

The main features of Analytics 9 Insight have been fairly well documented by now. Web Services URLs ready to embed in Excel, Story View, and RSS overlay among others. The following are features that you may not have heard about that come directly from listening to our users.

1. Shareable URLs

The original version of share included an email option. Then we thought about how people communicate in the office today and realized with corporate IM, intranets, message boards, etc, email was just one way in which users would like to share reports. We took a step back, removed the email option, and created a URL system that would allow anyone to copy and send the link to any other user. This makes sharing reports extremely easy.

URLs reflect choices in interface. Great for sharing.

2. Dimension and Measure Auto Suggest and Search

Creating custom reports in Webtrends allows for endless possibilities. Unfortunately, it can also create endless reports. When considering many different options in which a user could categorize reports, we discovered that most users could remember which reports they were looking for by identifying which dimensions and measures that the report is made of. In the profile dashboard, below the fold, is a list of all reports available to you for that profile. If you start typing a measure or dimension in the search box, the auto complete will kick in at three letters. Choosing one of the measures or dimensions will filter the list to only include reports with that measure or dimension.

Auto-suggest for dimensions and measures across reports

Filter by measure or dimension

3. Copy and Pasteable Content

Sometimes, when scanning through analytics data, you run across a bit of data here or there that you need to copy and paste into a spreadsheet or report. We prioritized this ability over almost everything else. Whether you are in the profile dashboard and click on table view or are in a report, you are able to select the data directly from the interface. Very handy.

Trend view

Switch to table view for easy copy and paste

4. Weekend Indicators

Insight uses 7-day, 28-day, and 91-day date range shortcuts. The first is typical but the second two are a bit peculiar. There is a reason why we chose them instead of the standard 30 and 90 day range options—weekends. You see, both 28 and 91 are divisible by 7. This allows us to display data ranges in compare mode where the weekdays align. Interesting patterns emerge when you show one date range compared to another and the days of the week align perfectly. This is extremely useful as most businesses see a difference between weekdays and weekends.

28 day compare view with weekend indicators

91 day compare view with weekend indicators

5. Date Range Options

The default date range options, as mentioned, are 7-day, 28-day, and 91-day ranges. However, if you click on Custom, you are able to select any range of days you want. After you make a selection, the compare default is to choose the same number of days just before the selection. To change your compare range, all you have to do is select the starting day and the application will automatically select the range equal to the same number of days as the main range. There are also other shortcuts available in the custom option. The year, quarter, and month are all selectable as shortcuts. You can also use one of the numbered week selectors, just to the left of each week.

Custom date range allows for day, week (shown), month, quarter, year, and custom ranges

6. True Visitor Metric

If you select one of the calendar shortcuts mentioned above (year, quarter, month, week, or day), the Visitors key metric will appear in the profile dashboard. Because Analytics is tuned to scan across these standard date ranges and produce a true visitor count, we added this when those ranges are selected.

True visitor count when date selection is set at standard report period

7. Pivot

When you drill into a report and have a specific date range selected, the last thing you want to do when switching reports or profiles is set up the date range all over again. We know that many users switch profiles when viewing similar reports. We added a dropdown to the right of the profile and report selection that makes this extremely easy to jump from profile to profile or report to report. This saves quite a bit of time.

Click on pivot dropdowns to change account, profile, or report

8. Adaptive Account Dashboard

Every customer is different. Some have many profiles. Some have just a few. And some just have one. We wanted to make sure that each customer/user had an interface optimized for them. If a user only has one profile, then they never see the account dashboard and jump right into the profile dashboard. This eliminates unnecessary steps after login. If the user has less than 25 profiles, they see the standard view which features a single table of profiles that can be sorted by any of the available measures and embeds a sparkline of page views. If the user has more than 25 profiles available, they are presented with the compact view which features four columns and reduces the visible metric down to one. In this view, the user can choose a different metric to display by clicking on the metric dropdown at the top of the screen. They can also hover over any profile to get a multi metric and sparkline view. Interesting tip. A user can force the standard or compact view by adding a query parameter to the URL. ?mode=standard or ?mode=compact will change the views.

Account dashboard in standard mode

Account dashboard in compact mode

Inspiration

There are many more customer-inspired features in Webtrends Analytics 9 Insight. If you are a current user, we hope you enjoy Analytics 9 Insight. After all, you helped create it. If you are a customer and haven’t been an active user, we encourage you to login and give it a try. When you do, don’t be shy about sending us feedback through the Get Satisfaction widget in the product (hover over Help and click Feedback). We will also be conducting some user testing next week, August 17 – 21. If you are in the Portland area and would like to test some prototypes of what we are designing next, let me know in the comments.

Okay, so – thus far, we’ve looked at two things on the scenario analysis report:  the fall-out (all that stuff on the right of the funnel), and the numbers in and of themselves.  If you haven’t perused those posts, they can be found in our archive here (just click on me as an author and you’ll get them).

So now, I want to talk about everything on the left – or what we call inflow.  Once more, I present you with the scenario entry/exit pages view:

So, 38,176 visits entered the first step of the scenario (that’s 99.28% of all the visits that entered the scenario at any step).  Of those, 931 visits literally started on this step – the first thing the visitor saw on your site was a product page.  If you’re running email campaigns that include links to specific products, this is a good sign!

We also see, here, the pages from which visits entered the scenario.  On step one, there are a lot of them – for some, it’s the video recorders page, others the search results page, etc.

The thing to keep in mind here is that the visits listed in the inflow are, very specifically, only the place from which a visit actually entered the scenario the first time.  So, if I started my visit to your site by doing a search, then clicked on a product page from there, I’d be part of the “search results” number (5,736) on step 1 above.  If I then leave the scenario for a bit, peruse elsewhere, and then come back at the “Started Checkout” step, I will not be a part of the numbers to the left of that step (so, in this case, I’m not one of the 5 visits that come in on that step).

Now, let’s shift to the Step Transitions view to peruse inflow there:

Here, remember, we’re looking at how visits moved through the scenario itself.  Here’s a sampling of what inflow tells us in this case:

• • 845 visits returned to at least one product page after adding something to the cart.  That’s good news – people are shopping for more than one thing!  Are you driving that?  Can you guide them to specific products they might want or need?
• • 203 visits, after checking out, went back to viewing product pages.  These people are still shopping, and it’s a solid 2.5% of those who bought something from you.  Excellent!  Find ways to reward them for their continued presence on your site.
• • Likewise, 317 visits, after starting checkout, went back to looking at another product page.  Are you driving that by offering related products?  If so – great!  If not – well, there’s an opportunity here for distraction, a possibility that you could lose those 317 visits because the person behind them forgot they were checking out.  See what you can do to keep them moving through the funnel to actually complete checkout before they shop more.
• • 40 visits started checkout, then started checkout again.  I wouldn’t worry too much about that; it’s likely that this small percentage simply idled for 30 minutes on their visit (which then timed out), then returned to finish what they started.

Again, these opportunities may seem fairly obvious, since we’re all familiar with the shopping cart scenario.  But if we can apply that same insight to our loan applications or our six-step “send me a quote” process, we can start seeing which steps are giving people problems, or seem redundant, or distract people from what you really want them to do (finish the process!).

So – I think that about covers the scenario analysis report.  Coming up next – path analysis.  Stay tuned!

Had the clock just struck thirteen? Had I just been subjected to 2 minutes of hate? Was I living in a dystopian society?

The answer to all the above is no—I’m not Winston Smith and the year is not 1984. Phew! But, Big Brother IS following me on Twitter.

The Big Brother I am talking is not the totalitarian state (not is this blog anyway) but of course the successful reality TV show.

WHY?

In the UK certain events quintessentially define British summer time these range from Wimbledon and Royal Ascot to the Glastonbury music festival. Over the last 10 years the phenomenon that is BB has rowdily forced its way into this, creating a televisual feast of reality on our screens 24 hours a day 7 days a week for the entire summer period.

Rewind to the beginning of this years “summer”, Webtrends had just launched social measurement (if you haven’t seen it call your local rep and demand a demo! IT’S AMAZING) and I had been working through some demo ideas to show customers. I chose Big Brother for a topic idea as it has an element of community—stuff happens and the power of social media means that people want to talk about it instantly. One of my initial ideas was to compare traditional summer events with Big Brother and the results are of this are below:

Astonishing, but actually Big Brother gets far more mentions in social media than “traditional” summer events. I just guess sports events haven’t captured the hearts and minds of Twitterers in the same way reality TV has.

During the time of the MP expenses scandal exposed superbly by one of our customers, The Daily Telegraph, one of the housemates called “halfwit” (read here to find out why he is called that) had shown an interest in becoming a politician after the show. So I did a comparison of mentions for that week betwixt him and the major political figures in the UK today:

Amazingly again the housemate, even in these troubled times had more share of voice than the 2 leaders of the opposition parties in the UK and on one day eclipsing the Prime Minister himself!

I also made a conscious effort not to watch the actual TV show itself , but actually use mentions and conversation cloud to understand what had actually gone on within the house.

This sort of fun insight is better shared with the Big Brother community than locked away in a demo, so I started tweeting the outcomes of some of the trends I had discovered and two things happened…

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MKS2qV1FKVs]

One of the features that got me really excited about Analytics 9 is the RSS overlay. Being in charge of social media marketing, there’s not much that I care about more than how offsite activity translates into website analytics, which then connects to our sales funnel. RSS overlay makes it easier for me to report the ROI of our social media activity. Anyone involved in social media marketing knows what a challenge it can be to demonstrate the ROI of our work, so anything that makes it easier is my friend.

I use Webtrends Social Measurement to track a variety of topics around the web, including our reputation. I wanted to share how I use our WSM reputation tracking data to quickly understand the impact of our offsite work.

Recently, we launched a social media campaign that had strong results. Using Analytics 9, I was able to get a visual on what social media caused an impact on our site. Below is the screenshot from that campaign in Analytics 9 using the RSS overlay view:

Seeing that data allowed me to send an informed request for a deeper dive on analytics to Elizabeth, who is in charge of Measurement and Optimization here. I was then able to use the RSS overlay graph and Elizabeth’s stats to report our campaign’s success to the company. I looked good. The company benefited. It was a win win and here’s how I did it:

Steps to pull WSM feed into Analytics 9’s RSS Overlay

1. Select the “Configuration” icon on the River of News (RoN) widget you want to use and note down the “wiid” number found at the top left hand corner of the widget.

2. Send an email to Webtrends Technical Support with the subject of “Requesting RSS Feed” and the body of “Please enable a RSS feed for the RON of this wiid:_____”.

3. Webtrends Technical Support will reply back with a RSS feed URL for them to use.

4. Within Analytics 9, select the RSS view, then add in your new RSS feed URL.

NOTE: Any configuration changes made to the RoN widget will create a new wiid. This will need to be passed back through the above instruction chain to ensure that the RSS Feed will continue.

More RSS Goodness

This is the first post about the cool stuff you can do with RSS overlay. We’ll be releasing weekly tips and tricks including:

• Places to find cool RSS feeds such as weather, stocks, coupons, and more. These outside forces can lead to onsite impacts that would be difficult to impossible to correlate without the RSS overlay.
• How to combine feeds, such as you blog, Twitter, Digg, and other accounts into a single master feed.
• How to filter feeds using whitelists and blacklists to get at just the data you want to overlay.
• How to use authenticated feeds so you can pull in data like your offsite marketing calendar from your project management software.
• How to create feeds from scratch.

Webtrends has the following comments on the OMB’s proposal:

1. Webtrends supports privacy guidelines focused on transparency and control. Under the OMB’s proposed framework any federal agency using web tracking technologies on its Web site would be required to adhere to the following basic privacy principles:

• Adhere to all existing laws and policies (including those designed to protect privacy) governing the collection, use, retention, and safeguarding of any data gathered from users;
• Post clear and conspicuous notice on the Web site of the use of web tracking technologies;
• Provide a clear and understandable means for a user to opt-out of being tracked; and
• Not discriminate against those users who decide to opt-out, in terms of their access to information.

Webtrends recently stated its support for broad privacy principles such as these in the context of government Websites. In applying these principles, we respectfully recommend that the OMB focus on principles of transparency and control applied proportionately to the privacy risks. The OMB should also avoid being overly prescriptive about how agencies are expected to comply. Specifying technological methods that should be utilized can be overly burdensome and could even prevent the use of more protective privacy solutions that are constantly being developed. Instead, agencies should have flexibility to find effective solutions that work best for their Web sites and citizens’ needs, while taking into account the privacy impact of the level of tracking being conducted and the type of information being tracked.

2. Webtrends recommends additional tracking levels based on additional factors. The OMB has offered for consideration a three-tiered approach to the use of web tracking technologies on federal government Web sites:

• 1st – Single-session technologies, which track users over a single session and do not maintain tracking data over multiple sessions or visits;
• 2nd – Multi-session technologies for use in analytics, which track users over multiple sessions purely to gather data to analyze web traffic statistics; and
• 3rd – Multi-session technologies for use as persistent identifiers, which track users over multiple visits with the intent of remembering data, settings, or preferences unique to that visitor for purposes beyond what is needed for web analytics

In addition to these three tiers, we respectfully recommend that the OMB consider other levels based on the following factors:

• Whether First Party Cookies Are Implemented. Federal web administrators that choose to serve first party cookies should have less stringent privacy requirements than those that use third party cookies. Third party cookies are served up by, and data collected using, applications on third party servers. In contrast, first party cookies are served up, and data collected, using applications on the agency’s own servers. By storing their own cookie data, federal agencies can better control access and use of the data collected from visitors to government Web sites. Further, because first party cookies are only delivered by the sites they are visiting, privacy issues are minimized. With first party cookies, citizens know who is collecting their data and who they can contact if they have a problem with a cookie.
• Whether Web Analytics Data is Anonymized. A distinction should also be made based on whether personal information is tied to cookies or if visitors remain anonymous. Processes have been developed that obscure or eliminate IP address and other potential identifiers. Such techniques further enhance privacy, while still allowing for meaningful analytics. Whether these processes are used should be taken into account as additional factors in determining what levels of privacy protections should be applied.

Webtrends encourages the OMB to take its comments into consideration as it continues to develop its policy. We also urge our federal government clients to submit input to the OMB Proposed Revision of the Policy on Web Tracking Technologies for Federal Web sites to make sure their concerns are addressed. Comments can be posted until August 10th on the Office for Science and Technology blog, in response to the Federal Register Notice using methods described in the notice, or emailed to: oira_submission@omb.eop.gov.

Today we announced and launched Webtrends Analytics 9, the most significant set of advances in user experience and data integration in our 15+ year history.  Webtrends Analytics 9 is comprised of three primary feature areas:

Insight Interface: No Instructions Necessary

To compliment our powerful analytics engine, we’ve added a new interface called Insight. The new Analytics 9 Insight interface combines numerous breakthroughs in data exploration and visualization, including:

• RSS Overlays. Quickly determine how your web site is being influenced by other marketing investments by visually overlaying data from any RSS feed on top of trending web metrics.  Overlays from Webtrends Social Measurement, for example, provide direct insight into the relationships between web site traffic and activity on enthusiast blogs, video channels and other interactive media.
• Story View. Automatically converts data and metrics into non-technical narratives that provide written context that graphs and charts can’t. Narratives can be downloaded and shared as PowerPoint, Word, and other formats.

Data-in, no Restrictions. Data-out, no fees

Webtrends industry leading enhanced application programming interface (API) provides self-service access and integration of your online and offline data without any added charges:

• Live spreadsheets. Review web site metrics throughout the day in live spreadsheets that anyone can access. Create excel dashboards with live data in three easy steps.
• Data collection. Uncover cross-channel trends and business opportunities by programmatically sending data from mobile applications, devices and any other standards-based source to Webtrends hosted collection service for processing and analysis alongside your web site traffic and other data.
• Data Extraction. Populate widgets, dashboards and other applications with Webtrends data using the iron-clad, and no fee, Webtrends Web Services built with Representational State Transfer (REST) URLs and other web standards – or combine data from Webtrends and other business intelligence tools to create best-of-breeds solutions catered to your business.

Powerful to the Core

Analytics 9 provides all of the core analytics features customers have come to depend on with Webtrends On Demand, including:

• Unlimited scale, capacity. Distinct and fully redundant data collection, analysis and rendering help absorb even the largest spikes in traffic without system outages or lost data. Webtrends has never lost a byte of customer data.
• Unmatched data flexibility. Unlimited dimensions and measures based on any attribute or parameter let you explore your data without restrictions or incurring extra charges.

Analytics 9 is available for purchase beginning today. Current Webtrends On Demand customers have access to Analytics 9 at http://insight.Webtrends.com

And now the traditional product manager ramble (Wilson started it):

Truth be told, I’ve been doing this line of work for a long time.  But in all this time, I have never seen both the tireless dedication from everybody who worked on this project and the immense creativity and talent that was required to get the job done.  This effort was not only in product development, and not only in marketing, but throughout the entire organization.  People stepped up every day and offered their help. I am immensely proud to represent this product and even more so to work at a company where everybody is so passionate about customers success.

For those of you who aren’t familiar with Widemile, here’s a quick, simplified introduction:  Widemile was a Seattle based, technology marketing company, working at developing the best optimization technology on the market, called Widemile Optimize.  If you’ve heard of a/b testing and multivariate testing, that’s what our technology does and that’s what my expertise is in.

As of July 30th, Widemile has become a part of Webtrends.  This is an important day to all of us at Widemile because we now have the support of an amazing company to further our success.  Together, we will be able to achieve much more, much quicker.

Although optimization is a very young industry, the innovation to come will change online marketing in big ways.  Earlier today, I was looking through the Webtrends data from the testing we are doing in The Open Campaign.  Just that small taste of the future reaffirmed that this is the beginning of something great.

Additionally, I am very excited to for the opportunity to educate the Webtrends audience and other marketers about optimization.  Working as an Optimization Analyst at Widemile, I have learned from many successes and failures and hope to nuture a community of sophisticated learning and discussion around optimization.  Continuing from my blogging at Widemile, please keep an eye out for my new blog on the Webtrends domain.

All of us in Seattle look forward to helping Webtrends take online marketing to the next step.  Congratulations and thanks to everyone who helped make this happen.