Sparkling Sparklines

One of the things I really like about the new GA interface is the addition of sparklines. Sparklines, which were developed by information design guru Edward Tufte, are those tiny graphs next to a metric to give you an idea of trend and context. People are really good at pattern matching and seeing trends in a visual form, rather than looking through a long table of data.

But let’s give credit where credit is due as the Yahoo! Store platform has had sparklines forever. It’s not much talked about, but they have had this great feature all along.

The only thing that would be good to change is to make those sparklines a little bigger, but even so, they provide a quick visual scan as to what the traffic trends are for those pages relative to each other.

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