New Dashboard Interface is a Step Backwards

I realize that post may have been a little harsh...I guess I saw the last iteration as essentially perfect. I have really been enjoying and evangelizing RescueTime!

I found it much easier to navigate through time with the calendar on the left, which also made it easier to see what time period I was viewing. It also made it easier to select an arbitrary range which was helpful last week when returning from vacation.

The biggest disappointment though is losing the information below the tags and apps graphs.

I probably would have been happy with this if I never knew about the previous version.

Sometimes less is less ;)

Do keep up the good work though. I enjoy the product and didn't mean to become an angry web nerd! I just found it easier to read:

4.5 hrs work
45 min design...etc

compared to following graph lines to a bar. The graphs are good for determining relative value, but not absolute value, especially with the dynamic y-axis values.

I've tossed up a quick comparison with the only version of the dashboard I could still find on google image search. If I recall this is now 2 iterations old. I think I even like this better than the current version.

The size of the old dashboard is approximate since the image I found was already resized.

http://img101.imageshack.us/img101/47...

So here are some more detailed thoughts and some responses to your points.

Responses

1) Calendar Controls - This really seems valuable on an app that is so focused on time. Perhaps a good compromise is a google analytics style drop down.
http://beconfused.com/images/2007/05/...

2) Lists below Graphs - In the old design these were free. They took up real estate, but it was below everything else so it didn't push anything out of the way. Perhaps this is enough incentive to put the time spent graph back above the others. This graph can be extremely thin vertically and still be useful.

Additional Thoughts

3) The goals don't strike me as being worth the space they are granted. The graphs start over 50% down the browser window on a 768px tall screen.

4) Navigation - Right column navigation is not traditional. The old tabs were very narrow so they didn't take up much space...plus they are completely expected to be there. Besides -- a nice calendar could be placed over there!

Here is a layout idea that might meet all needs:

http://img401.imageshack.us/img401/65...

I would suspect it could be even more efficient if it was based on the previous setup as opposed to one that is a couple of iterations old.

The new interface is certainly quick - It's just lost much of the data.

Just quickly, I formatted my computer yesterday and came to the site to download the exe where is it?? The new site is nice, but needs a bit of tweaking. Like Dartmann111 pointed out, where is the download button now?? It was great up at the top with the settings etc etc etc, keep it there :) please. .. Ok i just found it, right down the bottom. I prefer it up the top, but thats just me.

Anyway You guys are getting closer, It will take me a while to give you some proper feedback after using it for awhile.

Few Quick Things;

I do agree the goals, takes up way to much real estate

Is it possible to perhaps be able to move the graphs around? similar to a igoogle home page ? just drag and drop?

The New graphs look fantastic, great job with them.

I am still waiting to be able to tag anything in Mozilla Firefox as Internet and then be able to also take specific pages really need that one guys. I want to know how much time I spend on the Internet, not just on the main pages. I know im not getting a proper estimation as i do visit several websites once or twice.

Agree with the words, needs the words again with tags and total times the top 10 and the rest was good too.

give me a few days and Ill give you some more feed back.

Ok just to give more info what I am talking with the auto tagging, and why I need it... here are some numbers:

Untagged, just this week, 5 pages worth of stuff, just on the first page the website add up to about 300 minutes. The highest webpage which isnt tagged is about 20 minutes. I know I should tag these, but several of these 5 pages I might use once, and its going to keep coming just random web pages.

I imagine it would work like this.. click autotag, then select firefox then click automaticaclly tag with this.

Or.. a filter perhaps? like in gmail? I could just tag anything with .com, .org, .com.au, and others to automatically be tagged with Internet? that might be more flexible.

You'll never keep all of us happy. But these options will give you a better chance.

1) The "simple" solution to this is to allow users to re-arrange their panels, a la iGoogle or Facebook. (I've using simple to mean "simple from the users perspective". I understand that this may require some quite complex javascript).

2) Put the "old" table that dartman misses so much as the hover text on "view all").

3) Allow us to choose "Bar chart/Table/Both" in an options setting.

For what it's worth, I agree that goals takes up too much real estate, but on balance I like the new design.