Blue Gradient in Google Analytics is Hard to Infer

There’s too much blue in Google Analytics reports.

From a high level glance, how are users supposed to be able to differentiate where the sources of traffic came from given that the bar charts use relatively similar shades of blue with no pattern differentiation? Then there is no clear way to change the colors, unless apparently you were to add custom code to define new colors.

The U/X Idea

Use more colors than different shades of blue for the charts in Google Analytics.

The User Experience Problem

The base charts blend together as they use similar shades of blue. In trying to determine which sources drove traffic to the website on a certain day, it’s hard to tell which source it actually is due to the fact that the blues are very similar.

Further, there is not an easy way, if any, to change the colors or even add in patterns to help differentiate between sources. Apparently users can add in code to create charts with colors, but this is not very clear as to a) how to do this and b) if it will change the charts on the main GA pages.

The U/X Solution

Either add patterns to the different shades of blue, generate different colors automatically, or provide an easy way for users to opt-in to using different colors for their charts.

Utilizing different colors will make the charts much easier to read and provide for quicker analysis of web traffic. Google Analytics is a very powerful and useful tool, but using similar shades of blue makes it quite frustrating at times to easily derive inferences from analyzing the charts.

Conclusion

Help a user out by differentiating colors/patterns away from the similar shades of blue. This will make an awesome Google Analytics tool even better.

Hope this article didn’t make you feel too blue, you’re doing a great job as is!

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