What I’ve been working on: The New Google Analytics

It’s been well over a year since Google bought Measure Map and I left Adaptive Path. And wow, have we been busy. The problem is, though, that whenever someone would ask me what we’ve been up to, all I could do is smile and say, “Oh, just wait.”

Well, the waiting is finally over - we can talk about what we’ve been working on all this time. Today, a completely redesigned version of Google Analytics is launching, bringing a lot of the simplicity and data visualization techniques we learned building Measure Map to a whole new scale. This was some of the toughest design work I’ve ever tackled, and I’m immensely impressed with well our team worked together, especially Greg Veen, Ryan Carver, and Douglas Vander Molen.

I wrote more about the redesign over on the Google Blog, and my colleague Avinash Kaushik has written a fantastic and comprehensive overview on his blog.

On a personal note, I’ve got a much different job now that the design work on Analytics has wrapped up. I now lead a team of over 30 designers and researchers responsible for the user experience of Google’s web applications. We’re working on Gmail, Calendar, the Office-like tools, Blogger, Orkut, Picasa, Talk and a bunch more. And that means I get to dig into some of what I consider the Web’s most interesting challenges and work with some of the smartest people in the industry.

Can’t ask for much more than that, really.

​