Traffic

An iPhone app designed to be the easiest way to quickly view and understand how your site’s web traffic is trending.

I teamed up with Jeremy Day, an iOS developer, who did an awesome job with the development. Our aim was to produce an app that gives you a quick insight into your Google Analytics data through a polished and interactive user interface. We called it ‘Traffic’.

Like most good apps, this one was born from a personal frustration of mine. I found other Google Analytics apps did a terrible job of putting your web traffic into context. There’s some good looking apps out there but they simply overwhelm the screen with too much data without giving relevance and scale to the numbers.

Responsibilities

• Wireframing
• Mockups of Rendered Design
• Provision of Bitmap Assets
• Icon Design
• Promotional Web Page
• HTML Structure
• CSS

The Difference

If you ‘re on top of your game and check your analytics data daily, you’ll know if receiving 25,567 visits in the last month is a reason to celebrate or panic. Our app is not for this person, our app is for everyone else.

We’re catering for people who run or own a website and want to get a good high level understanding activity, quickly and easily.

The intention of Traffic is to show trends in data and give it a sense of scale compared to a previous month or year. It’s important to know the performance of your website and the rate of change it is experiencing.

The Design

Right from the start of the design process I knew the design needed the ability to focus on a single metric as well as the ability to compare metrics. The user can see the current trend in the graph and the changing colour scheme gives it an immediate visceral feel. By using the red, amber, and green colours, the design leverages a colour scheme that is deeply ingrained in our consciousness due to the everyday use of traffic lights. Users immediately get a sense of the data before they even read the graph which I think adds an instant emotion to the data.

I’ve employed a very minimalist approach to the UI in order for the infographics to take precedence. I used a balance of gestures and buttons that allow users to explore the full date range of their data, which is surprisingly unique amongst similar apps. I’ve been careful to select what data is shown for now as I want to make sure each metric is displayed in a way that reveals the most insight.

We’ll be expanding on this in future updates, but for now we’ve curated it down to the essential metrics to keep the app sleek and easy to use for the majority of users. We’re not looking to replace the functionality and depth of the web version of Google Analytics anytime soon.

The Icon

I’ve gotten mixed feedback in relation to the icon design. Some have questioned my choice for creating such a highly detailed realistic rendering of a traffic light when the interface within the app is so minimal and stripped back. The reason behind this approach was to make an immediate link to the symbolic nature of a traffic light because of the importance the colours have in the UI.

I’ve been reading a lot lately about the trend away from realistic and skeuomorphic interfaces. It’s a loaded topic but I think there is a lot to gain from designers leveraging the deeply ingrained symbolism of everyday objects. Such symbols can allow us to communicate ideas and conventions much more quickly through the use of iconography. It just takes a bit of consideration as to where to draw the line between emphasizing function and functionless embellishments.

It took hours and a lot of maths to figure out how the hundreds of LED’s needed to be arranged within the lights, hopefully some users appreciate that kind of attention to detail.

When users log in, the traffic lights change from red to amber to green which making the login process visual and ties in the icon with the rest of the design.

The Feedback

Traffic was released in August 2012 as what we considered to be the minimum viable product. We’ve been iterating based on the feedback we get from users and our own personal use. I think empathy is such a huge part of UI design, so when it’s an app that is solving your own problem the results are more likely to satisfy other people in your niche.

“over 150 reviews and a rating of 4.5 out of 5 stars”

So far we’ve received extremely positive feedback. At the time of writing, May 2013, we have over 150 reviews and a rating of 4.5 out of 5 stars. Almost all of our 4 star reviews are requesting extra features that we have in our sights, so I hope to see this improve as we roll out future updates.

Traffic was a finalist for the Swipe Design Awards in the iPhone category at the 2012 Swipe Conference in Sydney. The award went to Soulver, so it is fair to say we had good competition.