Brainstorming

My hatch project is nearing its end and I'm starting to think about Barelytics more and more often. Today I wanted to take a break from hatch to experiment with barelytics designs a bit.

I need a sketching tool, so I started looking around and found frame0. This is literally perfect, I need nothing else.

I want to get better at designing ui and ux, so I've been reading a lot lately. I read through the whole Refactoring UI book and absolutely loved it. I'll definitely be coming back to it often.

I've also been looking at some other websites that I really love, notably everything from 37signals, like their Ruby on Rails and Basecamp pages. I love how chunky, bold and simple everything is. I also absolutely fell in love with the Helm website the first time I landed on it. I guess my taste is these chunky, simplistic websites. I'll have to figure out how to fit that into my designs.

To get comfortable, Ill practice by sketching out the landing page. I'll look at some of the competitors for inspiration.

Looks fine I guess? Doesn't have to be anything special for now. The copy represents what I actually want from the product. Not sure if it's good as sales copy.

I'll sketch out the mobile versions too.

I guess it works. Won't dwell on it too much.

Next up is the actual app, and for this I need to brainstorm a little first. I learned from Refactoring UI that I should design features first, and only then think about layout, navbars and so on, so that's what I'm going to do.

Features

The main features I want for Barelytics are:

• Web Analytics
• User Journeys
• Session Replays

Web Analytics

For the web analytics, I'll start simple with what I find important, and possibly build upon that later.

• Page views – How many times each page is viewed.
• Unique visitors – Number of distinct users
• Traffic sources – Where visitors come from (e.g., Google, direct, social).
• Device/Browser info – What devices, browsers, or screen sizes users are using.
• Location data – User countries, cities, or regions.

I will not be offering any customization at this point so it's very important that my default dashboard makes sense.

User Journeys

I am not completely sure of what I want from this.

In my mind, it would be a mix of autocaptured data, custom captured events and session replays. For example, I would love to set up a conversion goal, then see all the users that failed to convert and understand where they came from, what they did, at which step they dropped off and their session replay.

What I hated while using PostHog was the constant switching between Session Recordings, Dashboard, and web analytics to figure out. I want a quick way to look at a Goal, see the numbers, and see the session recording if I want to.

Some example data I would love to see here is how a paying user got to the page. Another example would be seeing where in the conversion journey the users drop off. This could be visualized using something like a Sankey diagram.

This will require using autocaptured data, but also custom events that you can set up.

Session replays

This one is pretty clear - I want to be able to look at session replays of users.

This is all I have time for today. The next steps would be sketching out all of these features to figure it out completely.