They fell in love with the product & features so much, they completely forgot about the end user. The result is an application that has the coolest features, is very powerful… and either useless or cumbersome to use. It takes twice as many steps as before to get a report.

For instance, you can’t easily see the “inside day” chart of visitors, i.e. a chart with how many visitors checked the site during a particular day, at what hours of the day; you can’t easily see the geolocation of the visitors: it doesn’t help to know they came from the U.S. A lot of web sites are local in nature (or they run geolocalized marketing campaigns), so how about seeing how many visitors came from Kansas City, Jacksonville or Portland? With the new Analytics, you have to go through a few steps to get that simple data, which should be on the Dashboard; Also, the Traffic Source shows “search engines” and “referring sites,” which doesn’t help: which search engines? which referring sites? Now you have to go through a couple of steps to find that out.

It doesn’t help me that the New Analytics has a bunch more features and they’re really cool, when it’s a lot more cumbersome to use. When I use a product five times a day I can’t care less about how cool it is, I care a lot more about how functional it is. And the new Google Analytics is anything but functional.