Google has announced that they’ve updated and re-designed their popular Google Analytics program. Their main emphasis is on usability. They hope that the new design will be easier for people to use, so they end up finding out how powerful of a program it really is.

We started over a year ago with dozens of interviews with power users, those new to analytics, and everyone in between. They told us they needed their data organized in a more intuitive way. They wanted to be able to see traffic trends in context with more explanation of what the numbers mean. And they needed tools to help them communicate what they’d found with others. This research fed months of development and design iteration to create a totally new user experience.

It looks like most of the changes were based on suggestions from users, so I’m assuming the update will be useful. All in all, I’m pretty impressed with the Analytics program considering it doesn’t cost any money to run it.

Do you use Google Analytics? What do you think of the new re-design?