Last week, FeedBurner announced a significant redesign of their site. I didn’t post on it right away because the basic stats functionality remains the same.
People are generally quite happy with the change. And I have to say FeedBurner is one of my favorite tools - without it I would have a very difficult time understanding how much of our traffic was coming through our RSS feed.
Overall, however, though I don’t think the redesign was a success. I am finding that I am clicking (and waiting) much more often than I was previously to find the stats I care about (24 hour recap and item readership stats). Too much information is available only through secondary pages. A better information architecture would make that information more readily available.
I also think the site is a full generation behind the state of the art - adding ajax would speed things up somewhat and significantly reduce necessary clicks and refreshes. Some of the applications I am beta testing quite frankly make FeedBurner look very bad in comparison.
fiftyfoureleven has additional thoughts as well.
I am a big fan of FeedBurner, so take this criticism very lightly. 99% of what they do, they do extremely well, and frankly that is (mostly) all that matters.
We’ve written previously about FeedBurner on July 15, 2005, July 4, 2005 and June 14, 2005.
Hello Michael,
Thanks for the comments and valuable redesign feedback. We realize a little Ajax integration would go a long way with certain stats views, and we’re hoping to incorporate some of that goodness in the coming weeks and months (ah, priorities). As for the extra clicks — I hear you, and I’m hopeful we can provide some quick additional shortcuts directly from My Feeds to the views you care about, such as 24 Hour Readership/ Item Details breakdown. As always, we’ll continue with the incremental improvements (corrections? :^) ) based on feedback like yours. Thanks for the trackback, and for sharing what you think!
Matt, wow that was a fast response. We’re looking forward to future releases. All of this stuff will help.
Some excellent points, Michael. Thanks a lot!
The things you mentioned have been on our minds, so we hope to deliver on some of that soon. In the meantime, may I suggest an old-skool “no click” way to get to your favorite stats views? Bookmark it
Thanks again. Keep the quality feedback coming!
John, I have bookmarked the stats page…it may be that I haven’t spent enough time playing with it, but the bookmark seems to default to the 30 day trailing data, which requires a long db delay. Trying to just bookmark the 24 hour stats.
Hey Michael, I have a quick followup question… Which stats do you look at most often?
By “24 hour recap,” do you mean the pie-chart page?
By “item readership stats,” do you mean the item stats titled “Content Item Traffic Details” ?
Or am I totally off-base? I want to make sure we have a clear understanding of what your most common destinations are.
Thanks!
yes…readership and item stats.
You should be able to bookmark the 24-hr range on the item stats view.
I agree with your comments overall. On a minor note, I do like the “Troubleshootize” tab - it’s nice that they injected a bit of humor into their app. Makes a potentially daunting part of the site seem more user-friendly, in my opinion.
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