This month in leaguevine-developers 8/13/2012

[Mark Liu]

1. Redesign is live

2. More sports are available

3. Major Ultistats changes

4. User testing group

1.

Our full site redesign went live last week! We're really excited about this. It not only looks much better, but from our limited user testing it seems a lot easier to use as well. Plus it's almost twice as fast. We hope you like it, and we hope this will increase our user numbers as well as engagement so you all have a bigger platform to develop on top of.

2.

Users can now create their own leagues, and can do so for a number of different team sports. Click the league navigation dropdown to see what choices there are. We don't have stats functionality built for any of the other sports yet, and we haven't even chosen which sport we'll build a stats backend for next. If you are considering writing a stats app (or adapting Chad's app) for another sport, please let me know so we can use that information while weighing our options. Roger's brother hopes to write a basketball stat taker using the Leaguevine-Ultistats app for the backbone.

3.

Chad has been killing it with his Leaguevine-Ultistats app. It's been a while since my last update, and since then he released a Web-SQL plugin into his app so all of the data created is now stored locally on your device as well. This makes it faster and allows this data to be persistent in the event you lose your internet connection. 

Not only that, but he re-thought the game tracking substitution screens, and the navigation between these screens and the main action screen. It's really slick and easy to use now. Not that many people are using this new version (and that's mostly my fault for not doing better PR), but those who are using it absolutely love it. We get emails and facebook messages from happy users fairly often, and have never had any negative feedback. Nice work Chad.

4.

We've created a user testing group for trying out new parts of the site and giving us usability feedback. We had an amazing response from our first user test last week, and will run these at most once every 3 weeks. Each user test takes about 30 minutes to an hour, and we have you do a number of tasks on our site and report about how easy you thought the task was and what you liked/didn't like about the experience. We have enough awesome people in this group already (11), but if you want to join, having 2-3 more would be great and your input might make a huge difference in our product.

Thanks everyone, and happy coding!

Mark

[Alex Grin]

The new design looks great. I like the large pictures and the direct call to action. However, I find it very annoying that I cannot easily get to the meat of the site without creating an account and logging in (this was an issue with the old design as well). Was this an intentional design choice? If so, I think it's a mistake. When most people come to Leaguevine.com, they are looking for info on a game that's happening right now or for past results or player stats. That's the number one thing that users want and it does not require a login, but it's hidden away and very difficult to access. The simplest path I've found so far is to click About at the bottom of the page, then click the "USAU College National Championships" link in the second paragraph under How It Began, then click the "Leagues" button that's faded and out of the way in the top-right corner, and only then can I start looking for the league or tournament I want.

The goal is to impress visitors as quickly and powerfully as possible, not make them jump through hoops needlessly. Once they see what the site has to offer, they'll naturally want to use it for their stats. If I were designing the homepage, I'd change the call to action from "Connect with facebook" to "See what's going on at ECC" or something like that. If that's not an option, at least have a list of the tournaments that are going on right now (or the most recent ones if there aren't any happening at the moment) along with a button to see other stats. The less friction between what people want and what they get, the better.

- Grin

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[Mark Liu]

Hey Alex,

Thanks for the thoughts. The required login is a design choice and we made that choice because the logged in user experience is a lot better than the experience for non-logged in users. Logged in users receive a custom news feed based on who they are fans of, and can interact with players and teams. Our goal is to build a close-knit, engaged community of athletes, and the sports media aspect (i.e. passively viewing scores and such) is just a convenient by-product.

All that being said, as we move forward, we hope to experiment with different landing pages and see what results in the most engagement. So we really appreciate your thoughts.

Thanks,

Mark

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