As Director of User Experience for AddThis I’m fortunate to have the opportunity to participate in design-related events and collaborate with other creative professionals. This week I’ll be attending the Web Intents Design Push in Brighton, UK with design and development leads from Mozilla, Google Chrome, and the W3C.
A Design Push brings designers and technologists together to collaborate on a variety of technologies. For this first Design Push, we’ll be working on Web Intents, which make it easier for site operators to offer visitors a more personalized way to interact with content.
Derived from a similar specification used by Android mobile phones, Web Intents determine what kind of actions (“share”, “save”, etc.) a user might want to perform on an object (a page, a picture), and which methods that particular user prefers. The group will focus on the various user experience and technical challenges specific to these kinds of interactions.
As we’ve built AddThis and OExchange, we’ve pursued similar goals in order to provide social tools that meet the needs that publishers have said they care most about:
Easy installation and customization of in-page tools
Performance, reliability, and security of any 3rd party tool
Increased traffic and audience via optimization and personalization
Support for rich embedded experiences offered by services like Facebook and Twitter such as Like and Follow
Comprehensive tracking and reporting
Opportunities for promotion and monetization
I’m looking forward to exploring ways that Web Intents can help publishers achieve these kinds of goals. Also, I’d like to extend our thanks to event organizers Glenn Jones, Andy Dennis, and Danny Hope for the invitation. If you’d like to follow the day’s activities on Twitter, we’ll be using the hashtag #pushwebintents.
Which pages are trending, right now? Which searches are bringing traffic to your site, and what words are visitors copying in order to search or email friends? What interests your visitors, and what are they saying about your website or blog? Find out the answers to these questions using your newly expanded AddThis Analytics Live View.
What’s Live View?
The AddThis Analytics Live View provides a look at what’s happening right now, across your site or for a specific page, including:
A map showing where people are interacting with your pages
A list of your top content, right now, based on shares and traffic back to your site
Your viewers’ interests, and what they’re saying about your content on Twitter
The Live View also introduces new types of information to help you understand how your audience is interacting with your site:
Searches: How many searches are bringing traffic to your site? What are your visitors looking for? Live View displays a list of top search keywords and phrases.
Text copy tracking: While searches indicate what brought users to your site, text that visitors copy can help you understand what they found interesting, and whether these keywords align with your search meta-data to help maximize SEO. Learn more…
Zoom Into a Page
Interested in a particular page that’s trending? Zoom in for a closer look by clicking on it’s title, and discover how your visitors are interacting with that page, what searches brought them there, and what your audience is saying about that page on Twitter.
What do you think?
We’d love to hear what you think about the new AddThis Analytics Live View. Drop us a line in our forum with your feedback, and if you have any questions or need technical support, please visit our new Support Center.
You’ve probably noticed an update to our site template today. We’ve been incrementally rolling out a new template design to make our pages more consistent. These small updates include more contrast in our main navigation, an updated footer, and a small visual refresh. The update doesn’t change any site navigation, so everything should work the same. Here are some screenshots:
I’d like to take a moment to thank our team for pulling together a nice refresh. In particular, give Foo a pat on the back for a job well done. It’s really exciting to see everything come together, in terms of visual continuity and experience. Let us know if you have any feedback.
P.S. On a completely tangent note, anyone playing Gears of War 3 tonight? Drop us a message if you want to play multiplayer or horde mode with the AddThis team. Our Xbox 360 gamer tag is “Clearspring”. ^_^
September 13th, 2011 by jeffwongdesign in Design, Updates
Share at the Speed of Chrome
We’ve updated our Chrome extension with “speed” in mind. Like you, we’re a huge fan of discovering interesting content and sharing it with our friends faster, with less clicks. Our new extension includes inline sharing to Facebook and Twitter, more customization features, and an updated visual design.
Quicker Sharing to Facebook and Twitter
Sharing to Facebook and Twitter will appear as a small inline window. All you have to do is authenticate once, and sharing becomes even more convenient. Here’s how it works if you share to Twitter…
More Customizable, with Over 300 Popular Services
There are other places I like to share to other than Facebook and Twitter. For me, I’ve customized my menu to show services like Instapaper, Gmail, and Tumblr. To customize your own menu, select “Options”. A new tab will open, and you can start customizing your menu as well as manage your connected accounts.
Download AddThis for Chrome
If you haven’t downloaded our extension, click on the image below. As always, send feedback and let us know what you think of the new design. Ps. If you like what you see, give a big high five to Angel and Foo for pulling this awesome update together.
If it’s been a while since you got your AddThis code, you may not be enjoying all the benefits AddThis analytics have to offer. We’ve introduced a new Code Checkup feature for registered publishers that can examine your site’s AddThis code and determine whether it is up-to-date, and has the most recent features enabled.
Using Code Checkup
To checkup your own site, sign in to AddThis.com. When you start in Analytics, you’ll see a new link called Code Checkup next to your domain:
When you select that link, we’ll examine the code on your index page and make sure you’re all set to go with the latest AddThis analytics features like measuring traffic back to your site from social destinations, and tracking when your visitors copy your URLs into emails and IM conversations:
If you didn’t register when you got AddThis for your site, why not create an account and grab the latest code so you can take advantage of features like Code Checkup and industrial-strength analytics with live reporting and audience analysis? It only takes a moment, and we’ve added the latest sharing tools like Twitter Follow and Google +1.
We’re always looking for new ways to improve the user experience of our tools and offer elegant new ways to make sharing easy and fun. Along the way we strive for solutions that are simple, streamlined, and respectful of the look and feel of sites in which publishers install our software.
We’ve added three new entries to AddThis Labs that demonstrate these ideas and introduce some exciting new sharing tools you can use in your site or blog.
Design Updates
All three tools utilize enhanced AddThis sharing experiences that include:
a vertical sharing menu that presents more of the viewer’s personalized services to boost sharing
a redesigned email interface
a redesigned expanded service selection menu, to make finding your favorite services easier than ever
a redesigned share counter to visually match other counters you might be using on your site
We’ve also create two other new surfaces for your sharing enjoyment:
Floating Horizontal Bar
Imagine a sharing tool that only presents itself when your readers are ready to share. The new floating horizontal bar is easy to install and remains out of the way until the viewer begins scrolling down your page. You can customize the size of the sharing options, as well as the color of the bar. See it in action or just grab the code.
Floating Vertical Bar
Like its counterpart, the floating vertical bar stays with the reader as he or she scrolls down the page, but does so in the margin of the page instead of across the top. Like all AddThis Tools, this menu is completely customizable and includes the design enhancements above. See it in action or just grab the code.
We want to hear from you!
We’d love to hear what you think about these features. Please visit our forum and leave us some feedback and as always, thank you for using AddThis.
Our talented resident designer Jeff Wong recently created a fancy new “What is AddThis?” video and he really outdid himself! Check out his amazing work:
As services evolve and change their brand, we try to monitor their trends closely. Recently, our friends at Read It Later reached out to us to update their icons, and I just wanted to share the news. The new icons are scheduled to release soon, as well as many others.
Old Icons:
New Icons:
Ps. If you run a service in the AddThis menu and are changing your icons, be sure to let us know.
In our release on Feb 24, 2011, we made a number of changes to how AddThis accounts work. We made these changes to make it easier to access the site, organize multiple AddThis configurations, and share analytics data with others. Many of the updates we’ve made were requested by publishers like you. Also, many of these updates allow us to more easily help publishers resolve support requests.
As always, we’d love to hear your feedback about these updates. Please visit our forum to post any questions or feedback.
Easier Registration and Signing In
Our goal with these changes was to make is easier than ever to join AddThis and enjoy benefits like our in-depth analytics suite, tips and tricks from our monthly newsletters and much more.
If you are currently a registered AddThis publisher, you no longer have to remember your original AddThis username to sign in – now you can sign in with your email address. Your original username will still work, if you would prefer to keep using it, just enter it instead.
New AddThis publishers will now register using an email address.
New and existing publishers can now also register and sign in using a 3rd party account from Facebook, Google and OpenID. For example, if you register using your Facebook account, and you are currently logged into Facebook, you can sign in to AddThis with one click. Easy!
If in the past you created multiple accounts with the same email address, you’ll need to sign in with that account’s original username. We’ll help your recover it if you forgot it. As always, if you forgot your password, we can help you reset it.
Using Profiles to Get Organized and Share Analytics
We’ve added an organizational convention we’re calling Profiles to provide publishers more control over their implementations of the AddThis platform. Put simply, profiles are just collections of analytics data and configuration settings associated with a user account, that can be used as a powerful organizing device.
AddThis accounts can collect analytics data for multiple domains, and take advantage of more advanced configuration settings like blocked domain lists and custom email templates. However, in the past publishers couldn’t share analytics data without revealing their account information, nor could they have separate custom configurations like default email templates or blocked domain lists for individual domains without creating separate AddThis accounts for each domain.
Now, publishers can create a profile for each domain or set of domains for which they want to collect data. Including that profile’s ID (formerly “pub” or “username”) in the code on that domain’s pages will ensure that data collected from those pages ends up in that profile. Publishers can then share each profile separately with team members or clients.
If you are a registered AddThis publisher, you already have a profile. Your Profile ID is your account’s former “pub” or “username”.
If you are a newly registered AddThis publisher, we’ll create a profile for you automatically when you get AddThis code.
Profiles can be created and managed in Settings, and if you have more than one, you will be asked to choose a profile to use when getting AddThis code or reviewing analytics reports.
User accounts can have one or more profiles, and a profile can contain analytics data for one or more domains. This provides larger publishers more flexibility to organize multiple implementations of AddThis code.
Publishers can share access to a profile with other user accounts. Recipients of a shared profile will receive an email notifying them. If they don’t already have an account, they will be asked to create one.
Access to profiles can be “View and Make Changes” or “View Reports Only”. A publisher might grant a team member’s account full access, while granting a client permission simply to view reports and not make any changes to configuration settings.
To learn more about creating and managing profiles, please visit our help page, Using Profiles.
As services evolve and change their brand, we try to monitor trends as close as possible. Recently, we reached out to Twitter because we’ve noticed that they’ve been using the bird icon instead of the “T”. Often times it’s scary to change an icon that has so much recognition across the web. The first thing I usually ask is if the icon change will affect share rate. This is something that we’re going to be monitoring closely, and I’d love to share the results after we collect enough data.
New Icons:
Old Icons:
If you have AddThis installed on your site, we automatically update your icons on a regular basis. Also, if you run a service in the AddThis menu and you are changing your icons, be sure to let us know!
