March 18, 2004
Bracktology Design
It is that time of year again, today the big dance starts once again. College Basketball’s March madness begins. Every year I make my picks and hope for the best. The past few year I have been setting up my picks through online bracket managers. They make it so much easier to follow who has won and lost and keeps a point total for you to compare to others playing around you. This year I am signed up with through two different services CBS Sportsline and ESPN.
Both were easy to use, but designed quite differently. CBS uses javascript to set your picks and ESPN uses flash. So what method do you think is the best approach? I will tell you what I think.
You could have the users make all the picks on one screen but it would be too hard to guide the user through it, especially on a smaller screen size. So both systems have divided the picks in regions. CBS's design is easy to follow but lacks in guiding the user to what region to pick after they are done with one. What I like about ESPN's design is that it alerts you when you have completed a region and guides you to the next region. See figure 1 CBS's design is quick in processing your picks whereas ESPN's flash manager has to load and that can take some. I was literally waiting for 5 minutes to edit my picks in the flash editor, I finally gave up and tried later.
Now when you are done with all of your picks ESPN will take you to an HTML version of your all of picks in every region or you can choose to view them in flash but you have to drag your mouse around to see all regions. CBS however, never lets you view the entire bracket on one page. See figure 2
If I want to print your bracket, ESPN has a button that will print it right from the your completed bracket page. CBS didn't even offer me the option to print.
Overall I give the prize to ESPN for best design and usability for a bracket manager. Their interface anticipated what I would want to do next and provided an easy-to-use interface. I think this is a good example of where the use of flash is beautifully executed and presented. So good luck on your brackets this year and may the best guesses win.
Blake