When I wrote about my two keys to Kontera success, I was only looking at the implementation of Kontera on your blog.
Now that I’ve been using Kontera a little more, I’ve discovered an issue with the user interface used by publishers to review their account. While it is not a serious issue, I do find it to be more and more of an inconvenience.
Clumsy Date Range Controls
When you first log into your Kontera management console and select the Reports tab, you are presented with a Partner Activity Report toolbar that defaults the values to the last seven days.

The issue isn’t so much that the date values are preset to the last 7 days but more the style of the controls available to the user.
Having the month, day and year be individual list controls for both the From and To dates makes the process a little inconvenient, often resulting in the need to adjust 4 out of the 6 boxes to get the desired result.

How To Make It Better
In an effort to make the date range controls a little more user-friendly, I’d love to see Kontera take a page out of the Google AdSense book.
The AdSense interface provides a list box that has a handful of predefined date ranges that satisfy most of the criteria one would care to specifiy, including the following options:
- Today
- Yesterday
- Last 7 days
- This month
- Last month
- All time
Why is this better than the current implementation at Kontera? The key advantage in my opinion is that this allows the user to select one value from one listbox and the data is automatically refreshed with the specified criteria.
In most cases, I do not see too many users wanting to view a custom date range that is not satisfied by these predefined settings.
While I think this is really a minor issue, I do find myself thinking about how much nicer the experience would be if the date controls were a little more user-friendly.
Is there anything that you would change about the Kontera management console?
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