I suspected that either MeasureMap was a wasted acquisition, or they were being tasked with fixing the overcomplicated and user-unfriendly interface that Google Analytics bore. As recently as yesterday, I asked “What happened to MeasureMap”? Well, turns out that yesterday’s redesign of Google Analytics, while something most people haven’t seen yet, is a success, was done by those same MeasureMap guys. Why am I not suprised?
MeasureMap was known for having a great-looking interface, and apparently Google saw a solution in it. Took them over a year, but the wait may have been more than worth it. Read Jeff Veen’s blog post about the redesign, and his new job:
It’s been well over a year since Google bought Measure Map and I left Adaptive Path. And wow, have we been busy.
…
Well, the waiting is finally over – we can talk about what we’ve been working on all this time. Today, a completely redesigned version of Google Analytics is launching, bringing a lot of the simplicity and data visualization techniques we learned building Measure Map to a whole new scale.
On a personal note, I’ve got a much different job now that the design work on Analytics has wrapped up. I now lead a team of over 30 designers and researchers responsible for the user experience of Google’s web applications. We’re working on Gmail, Calendar, the Office-like tools, Blogger, Orkut, Picasa, Talk and a bunch more.
Holy crap. Jeff Veen is running Google user experience design. That means the Analytics update is our first look at future updates to Gmail and other very important tools. That’s great news, and it also means you should probably check out MeasureMap just for a glimpse at the future. It’s beginning to look like the acquisition of MeasureMap may have been one of Google’s best acquisitions period. Veen’s fingerprints are going to be all over some coming redesigns, and that means we all win.
Google just got a whole lot better.
I didn’t even realize it was him writing the announcement on the official Google blog. Look at the title: “Jeff Veen, UI Design Manager”.
(via Kottke)
