Some Interesting Changes In Gmail, Google Analytics & Reader Are On Its Way

Posted: 10/21/2011

Ever since Google has introduced Google Plus to the world, they have been relentlessly working towards changing the face of almost all Google products. The theme seems to be simplicity and neatness, and one must admit, they have managed to succeed. Some might argue that Google Plus is not as strong as other social networking sites, but the integration of Google Plus with everything associated with Google is definitely commendable and I am sure there is a lot more in store for us.

Google is about to introduce changes in three of its most popular products: Google Analytics, Gmail and Google Reader.

Analytics is about to get more visual through its latest feature Flow Visualizations, Google Reader the RSS reader is about to get more social through its integration with Google Plus and Gmail is about to get a lot easier and visually appealing. Here are some details:

Google Analytics

Although there is so much that one can do with Google Analytics, its hard to imagine more features being introduced to this wonderful tool. As per Google, many users have faced difficulty in terms of visitor paths, pages and segmentation analysis, therefore to make things more visual and informative Google Analytics will be introduced with a new feature called Flow Visualization.

A feature that will present your website's insights more graphically and instantly by concentrating on how visitors flow across the pages on your site. This 'Flow' is divided into: Visitors Flow and Goal Flow.

Visitors Flow will show how your readers flow throughout the site, and where exactly do they drop off. According to Google, this feature is highly interactive and “allows you to answer important questions, such as 'How successful is my new promo page?'” explains Phil Mui, further adding, “You can also traverse the path towards or backwards on this visualizer to gain more insight on how engaged the users are to your new promotion.”

Goal Flow on the other hand, shows how your readers flow through the goals that you've set up on your site. “Because the goal steps are defined by the site owner, they should reflect the important steps and page groups of interest to the site. In this first iteration, we're supporting only URL goals, but we'll soon be adding events and possibly other goal types.” share Phil Mui.

Google Reader

Google Reader will be introduced with a whole new design, a design similar to what you see in Gmail, Google search and Google Plus these days.

Google Reader will be integrated with Google Plus, making it more social and allowing the users to share their best feeds with the right circles. “As a result of these changes, we also think it's important to clean things up a bit.” shares Alan Green, Google's Software Engineer.

Google has decided to retire features like, friending, following and shared link blogs inside Reader.
Alan shares that the company understands that changes in this product may put-off certain users and they may not like what they see. For such users, they will be extending Reader's subscription export feature that will allow users to take their subscriptions, shared items, friends, likes and starred items to some other reader if they like.

Gmail

People were not suppose to know about these changes that Google is about to introduce in Gmail. A video mistakenly posted on Google's YouTube channel (now private) unveils the latest (and interesting) changes presented by Jason Cornwell, Gmail's user experience designer. But before they could make this video private, a YouTube user reposted the video, thereby spoiling the surprise that Google seems to be pretty excited about.

So how is our new Gmail experience gonna be? Here's a brief:

Gmail will automatically adapt itself to fit into a window of any size.

You can choose to view Gmail in density of your choice: Comfortable, Cozy and Compact.

You can easily adjust the size of labels and chat displayed on the right hand side of Gmail.

One of my favorites are the new themes that includes some pretty cool high-definition imagery.

Conversations in emails has been redesigned where you can see messages in a more compact format along with profile images of people in the conversation.