It's that time of the year when I reflect which app impacted and impressed me across 2014. After careful analysis, I have a winner: It's Metrics (iOS) from the guys and gals behind Squarespace. Here's why:
Although last year's "award' was a bit in a hurry (unfortunately I ended up not using Fitstar anymore), for this year I wanted to be more precise:
- it had to be useful & usable;
- it had to be sexy;
- it had to stand out of the crowd;
- it had to be fast & fluid;
- and of course, I had to return to it on a frequent basis;
What is Metrics
If you don't know, this blog is powered by Squarespace - an easy to use and modern website builder. Well the guys behind this CMS released a series of tools including Metrics - the analytics app for your website build in Squarespace.
How it looks
The app itself is as minimal as it needs to be and nothing more: no clutter, no distractions, no banner blindness. It has a simple color palette that complements the visual tone of the app and it takes advantage of white space in a clear and inspired fashion. You can switch from the light theme to a dark one which adds an extra layer of colors. The font family and its sizes are so well chosen that if you focus you can imagine and see the guides/grid they picked.
How it behaves
The animations are smooth and meaningful. They offer feedback to each action and respond quickly with no or little lag time. The whole interaction reminds me of Google's Material Design behavior. Yeah, the era of animations in web & app design is here.
What it can offer
With the app you can add all of your Squarespace websites and view the most relevant analytics data you need. This is where Metrics stands out: it displays the data in such a good and consistent way that it's easy and pleasant to interact with it.
It offers you the right amount of data such as: page views today/this week (with projections included), visits this day/week (also with projections), subscribers, popular content, direct referrers, browsers, operating systems, device platforms, Dribbble and Twitter count.
I appreciate the fact that Metrics offers you only a bunch of the data. If you want the full set you can always go to the web app. Metrics is mostly for non-Google-analytics users, such as me, which prefer a straight, in-your-face statistic.
Conclusions
I think Metrics set a new standard in mobile data visualization and it proves you can succeed if you just keep the user's needs close to you. Dear Squarespace users, I recommend you use it. Dear Designers, I recommend you test it. Hopefully I will see something like this for all websites. I'm looking at you, Google Analytics!