V3.5 – oh, man

Hi Bartosz,

I’m glad that, after using our plugin for years, version 3.5 finally pushed you to come forward and provide feedback about the new interface. You bring up some interesting points, especially regarding colors. Let me start from the end:

• Version 3.5.1 will introduce an option to disable the new slick scrollbar, and revert back to the system one; I see your point, but we are getting very positive feedback about the new bar as well. Also, by default the scrollbar is visible when you first open the reports, so I’m not sure what confused you about it.
• Panels behave just like your WP dashboard widgets in version 3.5: they expand and adapt to the screen width. We are going to introduce a fourth column in version 3.5.1, to accommodate large screens ( width > 1440px ), just like WordPress does.
• Text size: we are using a slightly bigger font size, you’re correct. But that’s to accommodate, again, all the feedback we’ve gathered so far from other users who were complaining about crammed reports and hard-to-read text. We followed WP’s lead on this, by using one single font for everything, and we even removed most font styles (bold, italics) to improve readability. We will probably launch an inline survey (that appears right within your report screens) to collect some useful feedback that will allow us to further improve the interface
• You didn’t mention any of the new features we introduced: in-report pagination, streamlined date filters, reorganized settings pages, etc. I was wondering what was your opinion on those aspects
• Icons can be resized, but we also wanted to do something original that stands out and can be noticed. Plus, WP is setting a trend with their sidebar icons, which are slightly bigger in WP 3.8 compared to previous versions, so again we just followed their lead
• You make a great point regarding colors and uniformity/consistency with the color scheme selected by the user. At this stage, however, there’s still very little official documentation around on how to leverage those colors in a plugin, and we wanted to wait for things to be a bit more stable, that’s why we came up with our own palette. Which we believe is not that odd (we’re not using Red Ferrari or Bright Purple or Bright Yellow Mustard, after all) but we agree that there’s room for improvement.

On this last item, would you be interested in collaborating with our team to come up with a better WP integration?

My point is that our redesigned interface was the result of a detailed analysis of MP6 and lengthy discussions within our (small) team. We looked at other popular analytics softwares (google analytics, piwik, etc) and tried to find commonalities that could also work in WP SlimStat.

We don’t believe it was a HUGE step backward, and according to the feedback we’re getting in the first few hours after launch, we actually took a step into the right direction. Aware that there’s always room for improvement, and that we always welcome our users’ feedback, which is what makes WP SlimStat really special!

Thank you,
Camu