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Bug or feature: chart UI for Weekly Retention bar charts was updated - only 4 bars max?

  • 21 February 2022
  • 2 replies
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My Weekly Retention Bar charts have stopped displaying many weeks at a time. Now, they seem to max out around 4 weeks displayed (4 bars showing). (Bug? Or feature…?)

My charts use the following settings:

  • chart: Retention
  • measured by: N-Day Retention
  • shown as: Retention
  • calculated by: 7-day windows
  • style: Bar chart
  • interval: Weekly
  • date range: Since 12/17/21

Specifically, both in the chart itself and when pinned to a dashboard, prior to today I would see these bars on the chart:

  • Week 0
  • Week 1
  • Week 2
  • Week 3
  • Week 4
  • Week 5
  • Week 6
  • Week 7
  • Week 8
  • (etc, growing as time went on, since I’m using the ‘Since’ date range)

Now, I only see:

  • Week 0
  • Week 1
  • Week 3
  • Week 6

...that’s it.

I think this change was made in the last 24-48 hours for me. It’s a major regression and actually breaks some long-running analysis that I have been presenting to my company & other interested parties (around ‘Week 4’ retention).

Note that I can still retrieve some of this data via a Line chart (a not Bar), but this is not how I prefer to share the data AND it has less decimal resolution - line charts have one decimal displayed (x.x), whereas bar charts have two (x.xx). =/

So, firstly: imo this is not a good change. I’m not sure why it would have been made, or what benefit it serves to hide data in any case. If some users wants to highlight less weeks, why not allow that customization vs. forcing ALL users to lose visibility into data…?

Secondly, if this is just ‘how it is’ now...how can I view data for an arbitrary week (e.g. Week 4) in a Chart that covers a large date range?

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Best answer by seanzo 22 February 2022, 00:28

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2 replies

Saish Redkar
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Hey @seanzo 

I tried to replicate your scenario and looks like this falls into the  “just how it is” category.

Here’s my understanding -  as the time interval increases from your ‘since’ date in the Bar Chart View , the UI will shorten the number of individual bar weeks displayed and skip the consecutive weeks’ shown. I’m speculating that they do this to keep the bar width to an acceptable limit on the X axis. Also, the line chart view can accommodate more data points due to its very nature.

Totally understand the feeling on how this can be a significant shortcoming when trying to build and present an ongoing analysis. Have you tried looking into custom brackets so that you can have your predetermined weekly intervals set? Here’s a demo chart  which uses 16 custom brackets and I can see the full individual 16 weeks dating back to ‘since Oct 4, 21’.

I’d encourage you to submit a feature request here of the customization functionality which you mentioned above.

Hope this helps.

 

Saish | Need additional Amplitude help ? Book me on topmate.io/saish_redkar
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Thanks for the response, @Saish Redkar! I appreciate the Custom Brackets suggestion.

As an update for future readers, I can confirm more accurately what’s happening here: it looks like Weekly bar charts will show up to nine (9) brackets/intervals--but not 10 or more.

So, if I set the timing to 9 weeks ago using the ‘Since’ date range option, it works as expected. If I set it to 10 weeks ago, however, it omits several brackets and shows only partial results.

This also explains why the ‘8w’ date range preset shows all eight brackets, but the ‘12w’ preset shows only five brackets.

Given that discovery, it’s highly likely that this has always worked this way - and that my observation that ‘something changed in the last 24-48 hours’ is related to my data and not the features of Amplitude.

I will mark this question resolved.

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