The devil is in the details

March 22nd, 2009

I’ve written about the Woopra client last July, and had its creator Elie El Khoury answer a few of my questions just before the New Year’s eve. About a week ago Elie has announced the release candidate for the new Woopra version, and i’ve had a great time ever since playing the new version and searching for the small visual details that add up to a great user experience.

You can read about the new functionality in Elie’s announcement, and here i just want to point out a few UI elements that i particularly like.

The first one is the new sidebar that provides a clear organization of the available statistics sections. The different sections are collapsible, and the overall choice of colors results in good readability even for darker background colors:

The new dashboard view provides a vibrant yet clear way to view the overall visitor count over the last two weeks and the last 24 hours. Note the translucent charts for the counts the day before (in the top chart), and the translucent overlay for the specific node under the mouse pointer:

Translucency is used in a lot of places in the new Woopra client, but its usage is well designed and placed. Here is a map view with translucent overlay showing the details of the specific live visitor (note the drop shadow of the overlay):

Here is one more screenshot of translucent content. The map has an overlay showing the visitor count broken down by the country. The overlay floats on the right border of the map, and has translucent list and opaque glassy scrollbar to scroll the country list:

Congratulations to Elie and the team on the great new functionality and excellent new looks!