First version of Calypso Stats

[daniloercoli]

The UI still need to be refined, but major features are all there. We want to start testing new Stats for real asap, and meanwhile refine stats UI with smaller PRs.

Keeping track of opening issues here:

• [x] There's no selection highlight on any of the tappable views, which is even more important on Lollipop where ripples are used. The simplest way to provide this is to use android:background="?android:selectableItemBackground" on any tappable view (this will automatically provide the ripple on Lollipop and a selection highlight on earlier version).
• [x] Try to get rid of the setEntryTextViewClickListener() hack. See comment below
• [x] Make sure the correct date/datetime for the blog. Seems there is a offset of 1hr.
• [x] I recommend selecting the "Stats" folder in Android Studio then selecting Analyze > Inspect Code > Current Directory
• [x] The selection highlight for list items seems off. It should highlight the entire row - including padding - but instead it highlights just the text.

[nbradbury]

@daniloercoli Before reviewing the code I wanted to look at this PR from a usability perspective. As a blogger I found the previous stats to be hard to use and decipher, and on the whole I found these changes to be an improvement.

Most importantly, it's now quicker for me to see how my latest post(s) are doing (I would think that's a big reason people check their stats so often). I also think the ordering of the cards is much better than before (I'm happy I don't have to scroll as much to see referrers).

Last but not least, I like how more data is available now. The inclusion of "Years" as a selection is a nice touch - I don't expect to use that very often, but it's great to have this information when I want it.

With all that in mind, I was confused by a few things in the new stats, and ran into some problems:

• I was confused by the Views / Visitors / Likes / Comments counts. It wasn't clear to me that they were showing the counts for the selected bar in the graph. Perhaps they should be moved down below the "Stats for xxx" label to make this more clear?
• More confusing to me was the fact that clicking one of those counts changed the bar graph itself. I think the UI for this could use some rethinking.
• If there's a day without any stats, you can't click it in the bar graph.
• Under Posts & Pages, I don't think it's necessary to have the "Title" column labeled. Dropping "Title" and moving the "View" label up would save precious vertical space. (The same is true for the other cards, too - the first column label isn't necessary).
• It's not clear which views are clickable. Perhaps stats could follow the reader's approach where only clickable views are blue? This would mean all non-tappable views (such as headers and labels) would need to be some other color.
• I found the graph labels very hard to read. Making them darker would improve this, as would making them slightly larger.
• I'm confused by which cards are affected by your choice of Days/Weeks/Months/Years. I assumed they all would be, but apparently Comments, Tags & Categories, and Followers are for all time.
• Related to the above, I was viewing stats for a single day and clicked "View All" under Tags & Categories. The next screen showed me data for all time, but the title of the screen said it was for that single day.
• When data hasn't been downloaded yet, the UI always says there isn't any data available. For example, I clicked "VIEW ALL" under my stats for 2013 and got a screen saying "No posts or pages viewed" (to be fair, the previous stats had the same problem)
• I noticed that "Best ever" is no longer displayed, which I'm guessing some users will miss. Perhaps along with Days/Weeks/Months/Years there needs to be an "All Time" selection?
• The "..." icon under "Followers" looks odd and IMO is unlikely to be used.
• When you tap a post in the list, it opens that post in the embedded browser. Is it possible to open that it the native Reader instead? If you have the blogId and postId, you could use ReaderActivityLauncher.showReaderPostDetail() to do this.

[daniloercoli]

@nbradbury - This is only a short answer to all of good points above, that I hope will clear some of your doubts. We started working on this new version of native stats, both on Android and iOS, with the goal of to be in par with web version of Calypso Stats. If you access the new Stats on a mobile browser you will see the same UI, and the same behavior. Would you mind if I post this discussion on our internal p2?

[nbradbury]

Please feel free to share this with everyone else. I actually had the new stats open in the browser while trying this out, so some of what I said applies there as well.

[daniloercoli]

@nbradbury - Thanks again for your feedback. I rewrote below some of the points above, the ones I think are bugs. I can work on these for now, so hold off on review the code.

For the other points, I will share them with my team.

• [x] I'm confused by which cards are affected by your choice of Days/Weeks/Months/Years. I assumed they all would be, but apparently Comments, Tags & Categories, and Followers are for all time. (The UI is missing the "Other Recent Stats" label available on the web version).
• [x] Related to the above, I was viewing stats for a single day and clicked "View All" under Tags & Categories. The next screen showed me data for all time, but the title of the screen said it was for that single day.
• [x] I found the graph labels very hard to read. Making them darker would improve this, as would making them slightly larger.
• [x] When data hasn't been downloaded yet, the UI always says there isn't any data available. For example, I clicked "VIEW ALL" under my stats for 2013 and got a screen saying "No posts or pages viewed" (to be fair, the previous stats had the same problem)
• [x] If there's a day without any stats, you can't click it in the bar graph.

Improvement:

• [x] When you tap a post in the list, it opens that post in the embedded browser. Is it possible to open that it the native Reader instead? If you have the blogId and postId, you could use ReaderActivityLauncher.showReaderPostDetail() to do this.

[daniloercoli]

@nbradbury Fixed bugs reported yesterday. UI improvements that regard both web and mobile can be discussed on our P2. Will post a recap there soon. PR is ready for another pass.

[nbradbury]

Those fixes look good, but I think there's a problem with that last one. When viewing stats for a test blog that gets very little traffic (only me) I see the problem shown in this video.

[daniloercoli]

Maybe it's missing the "No activity this period" label on the top of the graph?

[nbradbury]

I think the problem is two-fold: first, the translucent gray bar above each date makes it look like there are stats for those days, and the translucent orange selection only appears when you tap an empty stat.

[nbradbury]

A bit more feedback on the UI before I jump into the code:

• There's no selection highlight on any of the tappable views, which is even more important on Lollipop where ripples are used. The simplest way to provide this is to use android:background="?android:selectableItemBackground" on any tappable view (this will automatically provide the ripple on Lollipop and a selection highlight on earlier version).
• When I tap a bar in the graph, the reflow in the "Posts & Pages" section looks quite bad (demo video). The same thing happens after choosing from the spinner in the action bar.
• After tapping VIEW ALL on any of the stats sections, the resulting fragment shows a blank row until data is loaded (somewhat similar to the previous issue)
• It seems odd that the titles of the various sections ("Posts & Pages," etc.) are all caps, whereas the two more important titles ("Stats for xxx" and "Other recent stats") are not.
• "Other recent stats" is a misleading title since the stats below the title aren't just recent
• Similar to my earlier suggestion about showing posts in the native reader, it would be nice if tapping a follower showed their blog in the native reader instead of loading it in an embedded browser. You can use ReaderActivityLauncher.showReaderBlogPreview() to do this. In general we want to avoid using the embedded browser when similar functionality exists in the app itself.
• Most of the icons (blavatars?) in the CLICKS and REFERRERS sections are just a gray box.

Also, I recommend selecting the "Stats" folder in Android Studio then selecting Analyze > Inspect Code > Current Directory. Although much of what gets reported is harmless, you'll probably find some things worth correcting.

[daniloercoli]

• When I tap a bar in the graph, the reflow in the "Posts & Pages" section looks quite bad (demo video). The same thing happens after choosing from the spinner in the action bar.
• After tapping VIEW ALL on any of the stats sections, the resulting fragment shows a blank row until data is loaded (somewhat similar to the previous issue)

This is because the module is getting in the "loading state", where it's blank with no title in it. See mobile web.

[daniloercoli]

• [x] It seems odd that the titles of the various sections ("Posts & Pages," etc.) are all caps, whereas the two more important titles ("Stats for xxx" and "Other recent stats") are not.
• [x] Similar to my earlier suggestion about showing posts in the native reader, it would be nice if tapping a follower showed their blog in the native reader instead of loading it in an embedded browser. You can use ReaderActivityLauncher.showReaderBlogPreview() to do this. In general we want to avoid using the embedded browser when similar functionality exists in the app itself.

[nbradbury]

If I rotate the device a couple times while years data is loading, I end up seeing a bar chart with only one year visible.

Just in case it's relevant, note that I created my WP blog in 2013, so I only have data for 2013 and 2014.

[nbradbury]

This just started happening: Dec 18 is now showing up in stats, even though it's still Dec 17. Note also that it says I have one like for Dec 18 already.

[nbradbury]

Just noticed that views & visitors (and presumably likes & comments) don't have thousands-separators.

[daniloercoli]

@nbradbury - About the timezone issue you've reported

This just started happening: Dec 18 is now showing up in stats, even though it's still Dec 17. Note also that it says I have one like for Dec 18 already.

Calypso Stats are returned in the blog's timezone setting, not the device timezone. Could you please check the settings in your dashboard?

[nbradbury]

@daniloercoli The timezone for my blog is correct.

[daniloercoli]

Ok, I've added the timezone issue to the list of things that are still missing.

[daniloercoli]

Timezone issues should be all fixed.

[daniloercoli]

@nbradbury - this PR is ready for another pass.

[nbradbury]

The new UI for Views/Visitors/Comments/Likes works much better and takes care of a lot of confusion I initially had while testing.

I still recommend taking care of many of the issues shown by code analysis, such as "null view root" which is simple to resolve.

I mentioned this earlier and I know it's being discussed, but I wanted to say again that the orange selection highlight in the bar chart is confusing. It only appears on columns that have no data, and it makes it look as though there actually is data. The light gray used to denote empty days is likewise confusing for the same reason.

[nbradbury]

• On smaller/lesser displays it's not entirely clear which "tab" (views/visitors/comments/likes) is active. A lighter text color for un-checked tabs could help.
• I recommend testing with a very high-traffic blog such as WordPress.com News. I takes a very long time for data to appear after switching between Weeks/Months/Years
• Items in the "Countries" and "Comments" lists show a selection highlight even though nothing happens when you click them.
• The selection highlight for list items seems off. It should highlight the entire row - including padding - but instead it highlights just the text.

[daniloercoli]

@nbradbury can't fix the "null view root" warning easily. The parent should be null there, since it's assigned later in reloadLinearLayout.

For the issue about empty graph, will probably be changed/improved later, together with the web version.

[daniloercoli]

I recommend testing with a very high-traffic blog such as WordPress.com News. I takes a very long time for data to appear after switching between Weeks/Months/Years

We're aware of this, since we have the same problem on the web. Caching/pre-loading of stats will be introduced later in 2015. It's not a big deal tough, since most users dont have that kind of traffic.

[nbradbury]

can't fix the "null view root" warning easily. The parent should be null there, since it's assigned later in reloadLinearLayout.

Try passing a parent and using false as the last parameter when inflating the view, like this:

inflater.inflate(R.layout.stats_list_cell, parent, false);

This corrects the problem by providing a parent view without actually adding the inflated view to the parent.

[daniloercoli]

Isn't it just a way to remove the warning?

[nbradbury]

That particular warning is actually useful. See this page for an explanation.

[daniloercoli]

Yes, the selection highlight for list items doesn't work fine. Added a bullet for this issue.

[nbradbury]

For the issue about empty graph, will probably be changed/improved later, together with the web version.

I think I'm not explaining myself well. To me the orange selection that only appears on empty bars is a bug that should be fixed in this PR.

If you tap a bar that has data, there's no selection highlight. If you tap a bar that does not have data, there is a selection highlight. That inconsistency is confusing, and it doesn't exist on the web.

On the web the selection highlight always appears regardless of whether there's data. Can the Android app do the same?

[nbradbury]

Related to the code analysis I mentioned, I'm seeing a big increase in build warnings with this branch. The develop branch shows 3 warnings:

Whereas this stats branch shows 34:

[daniloercoli]

Those warnings are about missing strings in 'default translation'. I've added/removed a lot of strings, and now 'default translation' doesn't contain old strings that are still in the localized translation files. This should be fixed once merged in develop by running the update scripts.
Don't know if there is an easy way to fix this without manually removing strings in all localized files.

warning: string 'quick_video' has no default translation. warning: string 'ssl_certificate_do_not_trust' has no default translation. warning: string 'ssl_certificate_trust' has no default translation. warning: string 'stats_comments_summary_footer' has no default translation. warning: string 'stats_comments_summary_header_comments' has no default translation. warning: string 'stats_comments_summary_header_recent' has no default translation. warning: string 'stats_comments_summary_label_most_active_day' has no default translation. warning: string 'stats_comments_summary_label_most_active_time' has no default translation. warning: string 'stats_comments_summary_label_most_commented' has no default translation. warning: string 'stats_comments_summary_label_per_month' has no default translation. warning: string 'stats_comments_summary_label_total' has no default translation. warning: string 'stats_entry_clicks_url' has no default translation. warning: string 'stats_entry_most_commented' has no default translation. warning: string 'stats_entry_search_engine_terms' has no default translation. warning: string 'stats_tooltip_week_of' has no default translation. warning: string 'stats_totals_followers_shares_header_content' has no default translation. warning: string 'stats_totals_followers_shares_header_followers' has no default translation. warning: string 'stats_totals_followers_shares_header_includes_publicize' has no default translation. warning: string 'stats_totals_followers_shares_header_shares' has no default translation. warning: string 'stats_totals_followers_shares_label_blog' has no default translation. warning: string 'stats_totals_followers_shares_label_categories' has no default translation. warning: string 'stats_totals_followers_shares_label_comments' has no default translation. warning: string 'stats_totals_followers_shares_label_posts' has no default translation. warning: string 'stats_totals_followers_shares_label_shares' has no default translation. warning: string 'stats_totals_followers_shares_label_tags' has no default translation. warning: string 'stats_totals_views_per_visitor' has no default translation. warning: string 'stats_video_summary_header' has no default translation. warning: string 'stats_video_summary_label_bandwidth' has no default translation. warning: string 'stats_video_summary_label_impressions' has no default translation. warning: string 'stats_video_summary_label_plays' has no default translation. warning: string 'stats_view_video_plays' has no default translation. warning: string 'stats_view_views_by_country' has no default translation. warning: string 'view_stats_activity' has no default translation.

[nbradbury]

Don't know if there is an easy way to fix this without manually removing strings in all localized files.

Ah, I didn't realize this was the cause of the warnings. I think we can ignore the warnings without resorting to manually removing the localized strings.

[nbradbury]

The changes to the orange highlight look good! I still find it jarring when switching between bars, though - it looks very odd to have the empty rows briefly show up in "Posts & Pages."

Is there a way to make this transition smoother, so you don't see those unpopulated rows?

[daniloercoli]

Selection highlight issue for list items is now fixed.

[nbradbury]

@daniloercoli The row selection highlight looks great now - very nice.

Looking through your code I noticed several places like this one where an Activity is retained, and that seems to be my fault because an activity needs to be passed here in order to show the reader.

I'd like to correct that as part of this branch, so you can pass a context rather than an activity to that routine (negating the need to hang on to the activity). Is it okay with you if I make the necessary changes and commit them to this branch?

[daniloercoli]

Is it okay with you if I make the necessary changes and commit them to this branch?

sure, feel free to commit to this branch.

[daniloercoli]

Looking through your code I noticed several places like this one where an Activity is retained, and that seems to be my fault because an activity needs to be passed here in order to show the reader.

Now that I'm re-looking at that code, don't know why there isn't a Weak reference there. private final WeakReference<Activity> mActivityRef;

[daniloercoli]

Jarring UI when switching between bars should be gone. i've tried different solutions, but ended up with the simplest one that involves an "expand" animation applied to the list container. Title of the module is also kept on the screen, and not hidden with that grey box.

I've committed 2 fragment animations I was playing with, just for reference and future usage.

[nbradbury]

The animation is an improvement, but it still looks a bit odd. The way the detail quickly vanishes and then expands doesn't look right, and it's especially odd when the data hasn't already been downloaded. See these two videos for examples.

Is it possible to animate out the current data, then animate in the new data?

[daniloercoli]

What if we just load new data and don't use animations https://cloudup.com/c53BuGr9XWw ?

[nbradbury]

Ha! Yes, it looks better that way than it did with the expand animation.

[daniloercoli]

And the following is with slide up / down animation when loading data: https://cloudup.com/c8ox_5TpRaN It needs more tweeks though.

[nbradbury]

I'm not sure about that animation - it doesn't quite fit there. How about sticking with no animation for this PR, then a separate issue to tackle the animation? That way we can wrap this PR up and I can merge it once the Travis build problem is resolved.

[daniloercoli]

I agree with you!

[astralbodies]

FWIW I used this animation in iOS for loading - its not perfect but it seems good. Slide up with existing data, slide down with new data. https://github.com/wordpress-mobile/WordPressCom-Stats-iOS/pull/89

[nbradbury]

:shipit: