After nearly 2 months of development, the new Clicky is now live. Here’s what it looks like:
If you haven’t been following our blog, we’ve had a public beta of our new interface available since September 16. (Hint: this is a good reason to read our blog. We announce important things on it!). The vast majority of the feedback has been very positive, which is remarkable for such a big change.
This is still the same Clicky you know and love, the main difference is the navigation. The goal here was to make it faster to get to other pages, and to load them faster too. We also wanted the entire site to feel like a true “app” instead of just a web site.
So, we created a fixed sidebar that stays with you as you scroll up and down the page (as long as your browser window is at least ~700px tall), and literally everything loads via Ajax, including form submissions (unless you’re using Internet Explorer, which has WAY too many problems to support this functionality). However, this new interface is a bit wider than the standard 1024 that most sites aim for. So if we detect that your browser window is less than 1100px wide, the sidebar moves back to the top of the window so it works fairly similar to the old design with the tabs on top. The tabs aren’t quite as stylized as they used to be, because we have more of them now so we need to conserve space:
Update: Some users are experiencing bugs with “small site” mode being enabled even when their browser window is plenty big. We’ve temporarily disabled this until we get it figured out.
To learn more about everything that’s new, please read the previous posts we’ve made about the beta:
Sep 16: Help test the new Clicky beta
Sep 21: Beta updates
Sep 24: More beta updates
If you’ve been following the beta this whole time, here’s what has changed since the last release:
- Aforementioned 1024 support
- We detect mouse movement now and keep track of the last time you were active, so if you were away and then come back to Clicky, whatever report you are viewing will automatically refresh so that it’s up to date with live data. This only happens if you’re viewing reports for “today” though.
- When a page would load via Ajax, we used to replace the entire “main” area with a loading graphic. We found it somewhat annoying to have everything be blank essentially until the next page loaded, so instead we now overlay a semi-transparent box over the entire area so you can still see stuff (but not click anything), and the loading graphic is now fixed in the top right corner of the page (so if you scroll up and down while a page is loading, it’s always visible).
- We investigated replacing the flash graphs with a native javascript solution, spent almost a week on it in fact, but none of the libraries are quite there yet. They all have at least one super annoying limitation or bug, typically having to do with tooltips or the axis/grid. We tried highcharts, flot, and dygraphs. We also looked at other options like raphael, but none of then had the functionality we needed. I’ll probably write a blog post in the future about the state of javascript graphing, but that’s for another time. So for now, we’re staying with flash.
- Spy fixed for MSIE (turned out to be some weird conflict with jQuery 1.4.2, so we’ve gone back to 1.4.1. 1.4.3 just came out today but the problem remains. We’ll have to dig deeper).
- The biggest complaint we have received is that it’s no longer centered. We played around with this quite a bit but ultimately were not satisfied with how it looked centered with a sidebar. Even with a fairly big screen (mine is 1900px wide), I still think it looks good. Just give it a chance to grow on you, ok?
We’ve had an average of 1,000 people using this every day, even without posting any updates for a couple of weeks. So we know people are loving it, but we also know that we have almost 200,000 users so a lot of you haven’t seen it yet. If there’s something you don’t like about it, please read through the previous posts linked above. There has been a lot of discussion between us and our beta testers about why things work a certain way or the reasoning behind certain design decisions.
But based on the feedback so far, we know that most of you will appreciate the changes we made.
Oh, and if you’re a white label customer – it will be about another month before this change is pushed to the white label. This is because there are a number of changes to our layout and CSS, and we want to give you a chance to update everything you need to before it goes live. We’ll be emailing you soon with more details.
