Critiquing interactive college hoops brackets
Tracy Boyer, a grad student at the University of North Carolina, posted a critique in her Innovative Interactivity blog today of several interactive March Madness brackets.
Tracy writes:
I started with the men’s bracket of The New York Times since it is my homepage.
They get bonus points for offering mobile updates and for providing capabilities to recruit friends and make your own group. Once each person fills out his/her bracket, it will track each person’s score and rank. It will also save my selection as a member instead of displaying an empty bracket upon return visits. Very nicely done.
I followed the link she provided and discovered the same thing: That page you see above, labeled “Charles Apple’s picks.” Does life get any easier than this? Very impressive.
My only quibble: The NYT page is just a little too wide for my laptop monitor.
Tracy’s second critique:
Tim Meko of The Columbus Dispatch gave me a heads-up about their interactive bracket, and they deserve kudos because they were the only ones who added extra interactivity above the bracket to provide more information about each team. A key player for each team was nicely silhouetted in the header when the user rolled over a team in the bracket, along with a variety of other pertinent information about their record, coach, etc.
The ranking numbers were on the small size and I found myself squinting when making my selection, but I enjoyed watching the header swap out according to my movements. You could also interact with just the header with their nice subtle navigation on the left.
Agreed here, too. My only quibble: I dislike having to sit through a video advertisement before being directed to the brackets. You can click to skip the ad, but still…
Tracy goes on to analyze three more interactive brackets and to link with each. Check it out here.
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For what it’s worth, I’m really impressed with Tracy’s blog. I’m adding it to the blogroll here and I’ll be blowing hours upon hours spending a lot of quality time reading her stuff.
There are a lot of bloggers out there who critique and comment on multimedia design. Tracy is one of the first I’ve seen who seems focused on values that matter the most to me: really good content and clear design.
I had begun to wonder if I was just too damned old to get my mind around multimedia design. I feel better now.
I found her this afternoon when, out of curiosity, I backtracked to find out who had just retweeted an item from my own blog.
For all my Twitterhead pals out there, following — and laughing at — my learning curve: Yeah, I see, now, how Twitter can even be a networking tool. Very interesting…