Early this year, CSS-Tricks linked to a page on Refactoring UI about building a color palette. They discuss problems with some common color palette selection options and ways you can get stuck with (or introduce technical debt fixing) problems from not having enough colors with enough distinct shades. They say “it’s not uncommon to need as many as ten different colors with 5-10 shades each for a complex UI.” That is, a scale of neutrals (white to very dark gray with other grays in between), a scale of your primary color, and a scale of each of several accent colors – at least one accent color is a must, but you may need more to give user feedback such as warnings versus errors, success messages, or information.

I got to thinking about the color scheme of this website, and another site I built recently which I had trouble picking colors for. What if you’d like your “neutral” scale not to be grays? The text on this site is brown; or technically, it’s a very dark red, #300. If I lighten it in 20% increments with the fantastic Hex Color Tool, I get the following:

This is not leading to a usable “neutral” scale; a pale pink is simply not interchangeable with a light gray.

However, what if you simultaneously lightened and desaturated your initial color? Would that work? My first attempt converted the color to HSL, divided the distance between the saturation and 0 and between the lightness and 1 into equal pieces, and stepped them both simultaneously. To my surprise, while the lightest colors are certainly more usable as a neutral scale than the RGB lightening, the intermediate ones are significantly more saturated.

For a second try, I exponentially decayed the saturation, using the points (0, initial_saturation) and (final_shade_step, 0.05) to define the equation. That 0.05 was done by feel — I started with 0.001 and my brown grayed out way too fast; 0.01 was still too fast, but 0.1 seemed too slow. I went back and forth between 0.075 and 0.05 but ultimately the latter seemed better for a wider variety of starting colors.

It’s still not quite as desaturated as the plain hex lightening in the intermediate colors, but it’s more comparable and still a big improvement in the lightest colors.

When I tested my code, I found it worked great for fairly saturated starting colors. For less-saturated starts, though, the colors weren’t great OR my equation fell apart entirely and spat back junk. I could fix the latter with some min/max checks, but that was suboptimal – keeping the same saturation level throughout the scale. Instead, for starting colors where the saturation is under 55%, the saturation value at the final shade step is computed as 0.01 of the starting saturation value. That works much better. For example, taking a 50% saturated dark blue-green…

Min-max checks in place, but using same equation as above:

With the adjusted equation:

I added a similar cutoff point at 35% saturation, dropping the constant down to 0.001, although at that point the linear equation works quite well.

After all that, do you want to play?

“Colorful Neutral” Color Scale Generator

If you would like to peek or fool around with it, the code for this can be found in my GitHub colorful-neutral-scale repository.

Fade to black and white image by Alexas_Fotos on Pixabay.

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Sometimes Google Analytics does things in a quirky way, or has technical limitations you don’t anticipate. Here are four such “surprises,” some of which come up commonly in reporting (the details of sequences maybe not so much). None of these are secrets, but they are all things you might expect to work differently than they do.

1. Exit pages have 0 time on page (if no event occurs).

GA calculates time on page via the timestamp of page load and the timestamp of the subsequent hit. When there is no subsequent hit, such as on an exit page where no engagement hit occurs, the time is 0. You can see this by applying the Bounced Sessions system segment to the Behavior > Site Content > All Pages report. You can set up an event to fire later on to give GA timestamp data if you want more accurate numbers, though you’ll never get it exactly without blowing up your event hit count.

Loves Data has a nice video explaining Google Analytics time calculation, or you can read Google’s session duration documentation page.

2. Revenue attribution is different in Conversions reports than in Acquisition reports.

In the Multi-Channel Funnels and Attribution reports under Conversions, Direct-channel sessions get credit for conversions that happen during them. In the Acquisition reports, that credit is given to the most recent previous session that was in some non-Direct channel (unless there isn’t one in the previous six months). Of course, there’s one exception as well: the Conversions report under Acquisition > Social uses MCF-style attribution.

Annielytics has a post on why Acquisition differs from MCF and some more details around it. If you need more comparable numbers, the Model Comparison Tool allows you to define your own attribution models, so you can give Direct a weight of 0.

3. Non-Interaction Events count as sequence steps.

A session with a single pageview is not bounced if it also contains a typical event – the event counts as a user action beyond the pageview. An event labeled “non-interaction” (the opposite of “engagement”), however, does not prevent bounced sessions, or affect the time on page calculation. That label is intended to be applied to “utility” events that are simply carrying data payload to GA for EEc or similar, not representing active choices by the user. However, in sequence segments they are counted as distinct steps, meaning in some cases bounced sessions can satisfy 2-step sequences.

I have no official references for this; I discovered it while experimenting to work out all the details of sequence segments.

4. Goal funnels have no effect on goal completions.

When you set up a destination goal in Google Analytics, you have the option to define a funnel of preceding pages. You can mark the first step of the funnel as “required” if you’d like to. However, this has no bearing on whether the goal is completed or not! If the destination page is reached, a goal conversion is counted – funnel or no funnel, required first step or optional first step. The only places in GA where the funnel matters are in the Funnel Visualization and Goal Flow reports (Funnel Visualization is a fantastic report, I hasten to add, although you can’t segment it). The only place a required or optional first step matters is in Funnel Visualization: only sessions that completed that first step will be included, which may not include all sessions in which a goal completion happened. All sessions that converted will be included in Goal Flow and the other goal reports.

Google’s page of destination goal examples seems to be the best reference for funnels, oddly. Their page comparing Goal Flow and Funnel Visualization may also be useful.

California ground squirrel photo by JoeBreuer on Pixabay.

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AKA “Surviving the Open Office.” I typically don’t have earbuds in when I’m working, but when it is too quiet or too noisy or I am distracted by other thoughts, they help. In fact sometimes they help on their own – I put them in, get sidetracked before playing anything, and find I’m already working better!

However, the placebo effect does not always work, and I’ve been gathering options for what to play through those earbuds.

1. The One-Song Playlist

I’m a very lyrics-oriented person, which means music with lyrics is in general a poor choice to listen to if I’m trying to get work done. The exception is a short “focus” playlist, an idea I got (via some other forgotten blog post) from Joseph Mosby’s post The Psychology of a Small Playlist on Repeat. The idea is that as you listen to a song on repeat, it fades away from your conscious attention, while still occupying parts of your brain that might otherwise interfere with your focus. I’ve had success with a playlist of 3 favorites – by the third time through they are completely gone from my awareness.

What songs to use? Songs you already like listening to a large number of times. I would probably avoid pairing songs that are extremely different in character – a low, slow song followed by a loud, intense song might still jar you – but otherwise it’s an entirely personal choice.

2. Lyric-less Playlists

I have a few bookmarked Spotify playlists that are good for working. No lyrics, not too much dynamic range within any given song, a good steady beat – those are my criteria.

I started with Brain Food, a Spotify-curated list of “hypnotic electronic.” Some of the tracks I skip but overall it’s still a good choice. I fool around with a variety of trance playlists sometimes, such as ~ Trance Chillout ~, but every one has tracks I have to skip because they’re too jarring, or they have lyrics despite the “absolutely no lyrics” promise of the playlist description, or because there’s a sound that moves quickly from ear to ear and causes me actual pain.

Later I learned about Retrowave, music inspired by 80s movie soundtracks and video game music, and two same-name playlists became my go-tos: RetroWave / Outrun by Spotify, and the longer Retrowave / Outrun by fatmagic. They’re still my standards, with Brain Food coming in for the occasional change.

3. Non-Music Options

Sometimes even instrumental music is too distracting for me, and sometimes I just want a change. Spotify has white noise playlists, but I find the jumps from track to track very noticeable, so for those situations I have a collection of bookmarked noise-generation sites.

The first I discovered was Coffitivity, recordings of a coffee shop at different times of day. There are three long tracks available for free, and three more if you pay a small annual fee.

For nature noises I have been enjoying Noisli, which lets you layer tracks at individual volumes; it includes various nature-based tracks plus a cafe, train, and some more white-noise-ish options. I enjoy dry leaves blowing around paired with a quiet stream, or paired with a rainstorm for a physically impossible combination of sounds. Rain + train is another good combination as long as you keep the train volume down. I tried to pair cafe and fire, but I could never find the sweet spot for the fire volume between “way too prominent” and “so quiet it just sounds like static.”

The most recent additions to my rotation are the many generators from myNoise. I have barely scratched the surface of the long list, but the tonal drone and soundscape generators are what I’m drawn to: musical without having a melody, a slowly evolving soundscape. The feature that differentiates myNoise from other sound sites is that every track is split out by pitch, even its nature tracks, and each pitch’s volume is adjustable separately. That allows you to adjust the track based on your preferences, your hearing, or the background noise you are trying to drown out. I tend to like the “brown” preset, which makes the lowest pitch loudest and brings down the volume gradually as the pitch increases. The site has bandwidth limitations and other restrictions at the free tier, but even a $5 donation removes those permanently. It is hard to pick a generator to recommend specifically, but the one I found first was Osmosis, one of the soundscape generators; from there I went to Northern Lights, a tonal drone. Those will give you the idea!

Adorable doodle by ElisaRiva on Pixabay.

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