Make the daterange for analytics more clear

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1

Hey all,

Ran into an issue that spurred an idea for tulip. We struggled to understand the difference between an analytic with the date range of 0 to 1 days ago and the date range of ‘yesterday’. It wasnt clear that the former was looking at the last 24 hours and the latter was looking and yesterday, truncated at 12am. Here is what im thinking to make this more clear.

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Within the date range selection box you could see the current range that would include. This would be a super quick way to verify the date range is set the way you expect it to work.

Feels like an easy win.

Peter

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2

Great point Peter. I have reviewed the offerings of dedicated analytics products, and they all have this problem- how to quickly communicate what the text descriptor of a date range actually means.

I am wondering if the primary way that you choose the date range should just be a calendar in the first place? That way, the user could select from predefined periods and know exactly what they are getting.

3

Hey Kevin.

I think the trick thing with a calendar selection is 2 fold:

  1. How do you make a calendar where I can simply select the last hour or the last 6 months. I could see allowing this granularity while also making it easy to select very large time ranges being tricky. Maybe when you click on a day it expands to show the hours and you can select those?
  2. As a user, how do I know if that daterange will continue to move as time goes on (is the date range absolute or relative). If I select last Tuesday to this Tuesday, will that range be exactly the same tomorrow, or will be Wednesday to Wednesday?

Thoughts?

4

  1. True. There would have to be a toggle between “Calendar” and “Today” so you could select by hour. And you might even want a “Week” view so you can zoom in on all date ranges within the last 7 days.

  2. Right, that would need to be clearly labelled in the UI. Might be another toggle- “Rolling” vs. “Absolute Dates”.

I will review the request around dates as text with the engineering team. The bottom line is that we want a better picker in the future that goes way beyond text.