A power user of WebTrends recently told me that, “With WebTrends, you are only limited by your imagination.”  For our advanced users, this is true.  They see the power of the platform, get in there, and access all sorts of custom controls and configurations made available to them. However, exposing these power features to our power users has come at a cost, the overall user experience.  When I joined the WebTrends team, my mandate was to dramatically improve the user experience of our products for all users. I am proud to announce the first manifestation of this initiative.

Previous Tag Builder - Version 2.2

Enter Tag Builder – the starting point for our User Experience (UX) transformation.  Tag Builder is a great power user mini-app.  It allows a user to quickly put together a powerful custom javascript tag for visitor/behavior tracking.  These tags work for both the Analytics and Warehouse platforms and even includes options for Ad Director and Quantcast tracking (2.2 release feature) all within one custom javascript file. Tag Builder, because of its small size, allowed us to do a complete overhaul on the user interface while keeping the engine that builds the actual tag on the backend the same.  We even included a link to the 2.2 version of TagBuilder so users who rely on Tag Builder can access the previous version during the transition so they can compare the javascript files for their own curiosity and quality assurance.

New Tag Builder - Version 3.0

The next four articles will walk through the detailed changes manifested in the new Tag Builder, the methodologies that led up to them, and what this means for the larger WebTrends product line.

Try out the new WebTrends Tag Builder yourself. And let us know what you think.

Years ago, when my wife and I were new parents, we decided to go out on a date one evening and leave the care of our son to a babysitter for the first time.  We were nervous parents and our heads were filled with visions of everything that could go wrong, nearly convincing ourselves to abandon the plans and stay home.

We had to go out and decided we had to get over our fears.  We started by writing down all of the emergency information we could think of on a single page for the babysitter.  This included phone numbers for our cell phones, doctors, the hospital, poison control, grandparents, friends in the area, and anything else we could think of.  We listed our son’s favorite foods, when he should be put down for bed, and what his favorite bedtime stories and lullabies were.  We prepared, packaged, and labeled food and placed it in the refrigerator, made up a bottle of milk, laid out his pajamas, as well as many other preparations.  Again, we were nervous.

When the babysitter arrived, we walked her through the house, showed her all the preparations, and went over and over the emergency information a few times.  This all took less than ten minutes.  She seemed to understand it all and her let us know that she had done this before and everything would be OK.

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