I have set up goal tracking on GA for my website. I can see the goals reported in the real-time overview as well as under Conversions/Goals. But when I want to see the multi-channel funnel report, like assisted conversions or attribution model comparison, I cannot select the goals from the "Conversions" field. It is simply empty. Does it take much time for the goals events to appear in conversions or should I take other steps I've missed.
Time delay is about 24-48 hours.
Related
Suppose we have an event and we want to prove that the event occurred after a particular date, we have a few easy ways of doing so. For example, one may just show a snapshot of a newspaper with a particular date and headline, indicating that the event is at least after that day. Or we could put in the ending stock price in a particular exchange of a particular date to say that it was after the end of trading hours of that day. This could be as fine grained to the second after the time when the exchange closed.
How to do the converse ? How can one say that an event occurred before a particular point of time ? One could depict large events (skyline of NYC to show various before or after WTC) and geological changes, but that is a very large-scale measure. Is there a much more fine-grained way to depict the fact, of the granularity of a few hours or days ?
Hash up the information you need to preserve (e.g. with a https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merkle_tree) and publish the resulting hash value openly. This doesn't disclose any usable information, but if you later need to prove precedence, you can disclose the values you hashed up to show you had the information at that time.
I heard a story of AT&T paying for newspaper advertisements, long before computer security was mainstream, which disclosed a hash value. After a while the paper became worried that they were publishing mysterious advertisements every day that looked like secret codes and AT&T had to explain to the newspaper what the function of these were.
(A web search finds https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg13318103-800-technology-computer-fraudsters-foiled-by-the-small-ads/ including
Bellcore began running its advertisements in the New York Times in October
1991. They were interrupted for several months when newspaper employees
became suspicious of their cryptic contents. ‘Somebody said, ‘These look
like codes. You might be telling a terrorist to kill somebody,’ says Haber.
Fortunately for Bellcore, the Times’ computer correspondent persuaded the
newspaper to allow the advertisements back in.
Beware - article is buried in CSS and cookie notifications and inline ads)
is it incorrect practice to add additional states and time tracking to the feature work item types? I read that the time tracking fields are available in tasks, i don't see anyone trying to add it to features. Our BA and Dev find that time tracking at the task level to be overkill. i presume additional states is fine, but maybe we are not thinking of features in the right way.
I'm working on an app that gives traffic alerts in real time and is based on crowd-sourced information. In other words, people use the app and report traffic problems and at the same time they are informed about traffic problems in their area.
A difficult task is how to distinguish real alert reports from fake ones so that the app behaves properly and is useful.
Do you know of any documentation regarding this issue or any programmer stories, insights into this problem? How should this problem be tackled?
What I've come up until now is:
each person using the app is uniquely identified
each alert report has a reliability value in an interval 1 .. x
the reliability of a report is calculated based on the number of users that reported it or confirmed it and the reputation of those people. But how exactly?
each person has a reputation value which is calculated somehow. But how?
I'm not sure how to handle the reputation/reliability stuff so I'd love some input on this. There must be some documentation on how to create a crowd-sourcing product that works.
Panos Ipeirotis has a fabulous talk on this subject. Yes, you want to incentivize good behavior. If Waze is too complicated this talk will be too, but it will give you a good idea of what is possible if you throw the kitchen sink at it.
We've got a surprisingly complex workflow that needs to be monitored by a quasi-technical employees with an in-house webapp. There's about 30 steps, some of which are manual (editing), some are semi-automated stop points (like "the files have been received" or customer approval of certain templates), and some are completely automated (file conversion, search indexing, etc). The flowchart for all of these steps is large and complicated, and three people might be working on three completely different steps at any one time.
How would you present this vast amount of information as usefully as possible to your users? Just showing the whole diagram seems like the brute force solution. But it's big, and it'll likely get bigger as we do more things. Not to mention the complexity necessary to encode this entire diagram in HTML.
I assume you don't want to show these just for entertainment or mockery, but help the users along the way, automating as much as possible, document the process etc. It would probably help if you clearly define the goals or purpose of your app.
I don't see a point in showing the entire workflow, except for "debugging the business rules" or maybe the clients want to see it.
If your goal is to help users do their job, I would present the state of the "project" (or whatever term fits better) is at, and possible transitions to other states.
The State might be multiple mostly independent variables, e.g. one might describe the progress of content - e.g. "incomplete" / "complete" / "reviewed by 2nd staffer" / "signed off by 2nd staffer", others might contain a schedule that is developed in parallel, e.g. "test print date = not scheduled", "print date = not scheduled", "final delivery = tomorrow, preferredly yesterday".
A transition might be "Seint to customer for review", "mark as content-complete", "content modified", etc.
Is this what you have in mind?
I propose to divide your workflow in modules and represent the active state for each module.
A module is a subset of your main workflow. For example it could be divided by tasks, person, roles, department, etc. This will greatly simplify the representation of the workflow. Let's says someone is responsible for data entry at many critical moments. We can group all his tasks in one module (or sub-workflow) containing the same activities, inputs, outputs and conditions. Modules could be inter-dependants and related.
A state is where we are located in a module. In simple workflows there is only one active task. In real life we are multi-threaded! So maybe in one module many states could be active at the same time. The state also includes active inputs, outputs and memory bits.
An input is something required to perform an activity for evaluation a boolean condition. It could be a document, a piece of data, a signal...
An output is something resulting from a task: an information, a document, a signal...
Enough definitions?
Then simply convert your workflow into a LADDER LOGIC and you have your states!
See Ladder Logic definition on Wikipedia
You display only active states:
Active task(s) for the module
Inputs required / inputs confirmed
Output required / output realized
Conditions to continue
Seems abstract?
Here is a small example...
Janet enters data in the system. She manages the green tasks of the diagram. We focus only on her work, not other tasks. She knows how to do 16 tasks in the workflow. We are waiting the following actions from her to continue, and her Intranet dashboard says:
Priority 1: You must send a PO to order enough pencils for the next month based on the sales report.
Task: Send a purchase order
Inputs: Forecast report from the marketing department
Outputs: PO, vendor, item, quantity
Condition for completion: PO sent and order confirmation received from supplier
Priority 2: You must enter into the financial system the number of erasers rejected by production
Task: Data entry
Inputs: Reject count from production
Outputs: Number of rejects
Condition for completion: data entered and confirmed
We do a lot of troubleshooting on automated production systems having hundreds of thousands ladder steps (the workflow is too complex to be represented in a whole). When the system is blocked we look at each module and determine what inputs are missing to activation task completion.
Good luck!
This sounds like the sort of application for which BPEL is suited.
Of course you don't want to re-architect your system right now. But there are a number of BPEL implmentations out there, some of which include graphical editing tools. One of these might help you in your current situation, because they are good at handling scope and hiding detail. So I think you might derive benefit from drawing your workflow as a BPEL diagram even if you don't do anything else with the language.
The Wikipedia page lists several of the available implementations. In addition, Oracle's JDeveloper IDE includes a BPEL Diagrammer as part of its SOA suite; unfortunately it is no longer part of the standard install but it is still available. Find out more.
Try doing it in layers. You have the most detailed layer done, now add additional docs with the details hidden, grouped into higher-level business processes. Users should be able to safely ignore some of those details, but it's good for them to have visibility of how their part fits in to the whole.
You may need more than one higher-level document.
You can use Prezi to present this information to users in a lucid manner.
Split and present the work flow into phases such that the end user is easily able to identify the phase he is currently in.
Display as many number of phases as the number of inputs. The workflow starts with 6 different inputs so display the six different buttons on screen enabling the user to select the input that he wants.
On selecting the button zoom into the workflow depicting the next steps. This would also help the user to verify the actions that he has done so far to reach the current states.
This would also help the user to verify the actions that he has done so far to reach the current states. But this way of presenting could become cumbersome for the users as the number of steps that he has completed goes up. Say the user has almost reached the end of the workflow. To check for the next step he should go through all the steps which might frustrate the user.
To avoid this you can split the complete work flow chronologically into 3-5 phases. The phases should be split logically. The ultimate aim would be not to overwhelm the users with the full work flow. Personally i would try to avoid the task involving this workflow if presented the way you have shown. No offense. I bet you also feel the same.
Could give you a better picture if you could re-post the image after replacing the state names with numbers.
I'd recommend having the whole flow documented somewhere, but in terms of what is distributed to users, how about focusing on task-oriented flows? No one user will be responsible for the entire process I would imagine.
For example, let's say I have 2 roles, A and B, and 6 tasks, 1 through 6, executed in order. Each task may have multiple steps but is self-contained (e.g. download the file, review, run process, review again, upload). A does the even tasks and B does the odd tasks.
A would need to know about those detailed steps that comprise tasks 2, 4, and 6 but not about what goes on in 1, 3, and 5. So hand A a detailed set of flows for the tasks he is responsible for, along with a diagram that treats each task as a black box.
If the flow can't be made modular in this way, you may want to review the process itself to see why it's so complex.
How about showing an example of a workflow scenario, that is, showing the transitions in one possible passing through the workflow? You could cater this to a specific user profile and highlight the pertinent states, dimming the others. This allows them to get a clear idea of the transitions by seeing a real-life example.
I need to let end users specify a time range, to be stored and used internally as a starting date/time and ending date/time. The range could be minutes or it could be days.
Has anyone discovered an interactive control that can handle this elegantly?
Most GUI toolkits have a calendar control, so I could specify "start" with a calendar for the day and a text field for the time...and the same for "end".
I could also replace the "end" controls with a single text field or slider that simply describes how many seconds/minutes/hours after start "end" is.
What I don't like about these ideas is how much clicking, typing, and more clicking is required to describe such a simple concept. Also I have to slap the user's hand if a time is typed in that isn't recognizable as a time.
Is there a cleaner implementation that I'm overlooking?
I tend to look at common design patterns for inspiration when I'm pondering problems such as this.
The Yahoo Pattern Library offers some potential solutions.
The UI Patterns site also give some suggestions, and is worth a browse.
For good measure, here's another solution at the Welie pattern library.
Another source of inspiration might be other sites and applications. For example, think of all the use-cases where recording short and long time time durations is required. As an example, company TimeSheet recording, company car mileage log software, task recording software, stopwatch applications, calendaring apps, etc. Then see how they've handled the GUI controls for capturing time ranges.
I haven't personally found a favourite solution for picking date and time. But, I think I'd want something like this.
User clicks to show calendar popup
Popup shows 2 side-by-side calendars (start date/time and end date/time)
Calendar 1 shows todays date, and the other also shows todays date.
Calendar controls allow usual navigation and selection of day month year.
Below each calendar is a hh:mm box, which defaults to the current time.
User can edit value in this time box using up/down arrows or by typing.
Alternatively, show an analogue clock below each calendar. It takes 2 mouse clicks to set time( click 1 for hour and click 2 for minutes).
Hope this helps
I am a fan of an old control I saw used WAY back in the 90's with Inventor (and later Open Inventor) on SGI machines (and then on PCs, etc): an infinite dial.
Some screenshots, a little on the small side, are here. Course, its been done on a variety of platforms since, including similar things on the iphone.
I think a date/time picker would work well with two dials, each representing an order of date/time magnitude. In ASCII art, with each dial between [square brackets] it might look like:
[20 Oct | 21 OCT | 22 Oct ] [11:15 .. 11:30 .. 11:45..]
or with 3:
[20 Oct | 21 OCT | 22 Oct ] [11 .. 12 .. 1pm] [12:31 .. 12:32 .. 12:33]
There are a number of variations you could try (vertical/horizontal, date/time, date/hour/minute, etc).
Dials, though somewhat rarely used, are a natural device for humans to interact with, and their infinite rotation option (unlike a slide which must always stop) suits dates/times well.
FWIW
User interface design is heavily application dependent. "Best" implies some kind of metric that can measure solutions. In UI design such a metric can be "home many clicks/key-presses does it take to complete the task?" where a smaller number is better. So once you've defined your metric you can start to sort solutions into good, better and best.
You also want to reduce cognitive burden for the user. If the user has to enter the final day on which a product can be exchanged based on a 90-day return policy then asking for start and end date would force them to do date math which is no fun. In this example a start date with a "delta" of x days would place less of a burden on the user.
Depending on you application you could consider and approach like the Google Finance time range selector on their charts: http://finance.google.com/finance?q=.dji
There is no single answer, it depends on the context. For many places good text controls are enough. Of course such things can still help by supporting pasting and some increase/decrease actions. Maybe it can even do some validation for the value.
Then there are places that need something more. Calendar can be really helpful for entering dates and some kind of slider could be used for time. (Lotus Notes calendar has a slider.)
My advise is:
Think what you need. Don't put complicated widgets to a less used dialog.
If you need these nice helpful widgets, check if there are ready made in the library you are using and take some time to see how others have done these.
Always have the text controls with support for pasting.
Check out the VisualHint date control. It can be configured a multitude of ways including a timespan. This would allow you to use one control instance to show the start time and another to set the timespan until the period is complete. The control also supports an extensible base framework so you could possibly combine both start/end or start/span into a single control.
Here are also some solutions: http://quince.infragistics.com/html/PatternView.aspx?name=Date+Time+Range+Input
Unless there is a more advanced time control in your GUI toolkit of choice, two calendar controls representing start and end is the most straightforward. Also, you need to decide how you want to use the information. For example, if you used a start date and an interval to increment that date, changing the start date wouldn't change the meaning of the interval. It really depends on what you're wanting to do.
One way I've seen work very well is using a gantt chart:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gantt_chart
You can create a single line chart and then you can scale it across months, days, hours and minutes depending on how wide or zoomed in you make the control. The problem is I don't know of any control out there right now that does just one line, so you may need to create a custom one. You could possibly look for a gantt chart control and just do one task/item.
Observe what people are doing with your time range control. Then write it so that it's most suited towards doing what the people want to achieve with it. For instance, leave away past dates if inputting future dates only makes sense.
Jonathan Leighton has made a nice date inputter -element in jquery that I've found very nice for inputting dates. This is beneficial in a way that user can both input the date by clicking or type it in directly. The user also directly gets the hint about typing it into the box. If you couple this with some kind of timeline -object, you may actually go far afar. Just avoid making UI elements that are confusing or angering!
This comes in late, and it's not a control per se. I read this idea on a blog I can't find anymore (in fact, I found this post while trying to find it). The idea is to use the metaphor of a wall clock. Here's what I implemented for the fun of it. It's not a functional control. You could use something like this as a starting point for capturing times naturally. Three clicks at most, two most of the time. Only dials come close.
http://www.viridium.ro/clock-sample/
Use a HTML5-aware browser; that is, Chrome.