You may have already read about it in our product update, but we’re revamping our analytics dashboard. Speed, efficiency and user friendliness are the cornerstones of the new and improved analytics dashboards. Time to talk to our product owner Tom about the new changes.
First things first, what’s the reason for the renewal of the dashboards?
“Our Online Video Platform was originally built 16 years ago. Although analytics have always been a very important component, in recent years we’ve experienced enormous growth. We noticed that our current systems were becoming less and less optimal to deal with the huge amounts of data that we were processing on a daily basis. We currently process around 50TB per month. You can compare this to reading 50 million books per month.
Not only do we foresee that this number will continue to increase over the coming years, we also expect the importance of data to grow further. This makes it the perfect time to invest in a futureproof rebuild of our analytics platform.”
Currently it seems like we’re in a bit of a limbo where we see a mixture of both the new and the old analytics dashboard. Can you explain what’s happening?
“That’s right and that will continue to be like this for a while. It has to do with the way that we’ve chosen to develop the new dashboard. You see, we had two options when rebuilding the dashboard.
The first option was to rebuild everything in the background while keeping all the dashboards in the current state and releasing everything together. The advantage of this option is that everything is improved all together, and you get to release a clean and renewed dashboard at once.
The other option, which we ended up choosing, is that we would rebuild the dashboards step by step. Although this option brings some “awkwardness of the inbetween”, where some dashboards have already been completely rebuilt and others are still in the old state, the huge benefit is that we can let our customers profit from the improvements as soon as they’re available.”
What other reasons were there to go with the second option?
“Every time we build a new dashboard, we can re-use the framework and components of the already built dashboards. This means that we should be able to release newer dashboards quicker.
What I personally really like about this approach is that it allows us to gather and process customer feedback as we go along, which we can then immediately implement when building the next dashboards. As we’re building this for our customers, that’s a huge benefit.”
What can customers expect from the renewed analytics dashboard?
“Everybody knows that analytics are a vital part of any good video strategy, yet we also know that they can be quite boring and sometimes even difficult to understand. We want to help you enjoy analytics and to really get the most out of it, that’s why our goal is to make analytics fun and accessible, for everyone.
There’s two steps that we’ve set out to achieve this goal.
First and foremost, we’re committed to rebuild the same functionalities that the current dashboards have, only faster and more user friendly. This will ensure that none of the important analytics our customers currently track are lost and will also make these features more accessible to clients that are currently not using them yet.
The second step will be to develop new tools that will make your life easier and provide actionable insights. Some of these will be more basic, such as the new data comparison feature. Others will be more innovative, for example, we’re looking at a tool to predict the best time for clients to publish their new videos, based on the performance of their previous videos.”
Can you say anything about the timeline for the renewed dashboards?
“The first dashboard went live this week. The next dashboard will be the dashboard that showcases the interactive video projects.
We expect to replace all existing dashboards in the coming 6 months. Adding new functionalities like the ones described above will follow in the months after. We’ll continue to follow the agile approach of releasing new updates as soon as they’re ready in order to let our customers immediately benefit.
Like I said before, the goal is to help our clients the best we can. To reach this goal, I love talking to clients to get their feedback. If you’re interested in joining our beta testing team for these and other new features, please send us an email at hello@bluebillywig.com.
