Online/Realtime Team Tracker

[tabstop]

At today's Eastern Virginia regionals, we tested the online team tracker I am building and expect to roll out at Nationals. As such, I'd like to share some links here and solicit feedback about the usability (from the team perspective) of the pages.

A team would get in their packet, among other things, a URL like this (+ QR code) that would lead to their team page. The team page has a link to the page for their first group (sample) and will grow as the day goes on. The group page will update as moderators post scores. (The section at the bottom that is blank in our examples would, at Nationals, be filled with lines like "First place in the group will continue in the Hedgehog group.")

What I'd like is some feedback, especially for things that are confusing or missing, or formatted strangely on a smartphone. I'm not necessarily concerned about "pretty", but "meaningful" graphical things (like the red/green backgrounds) are fair game. Also, if people have opinions on where info about playoffs/finals should go (on the supergroup page itself? as a separate "pool"? else?) that would be handy.

Note: the scores in the middle table are organized by round, rather than in a traditional cross-table (with team x team results), as the varsity played a double-round-robin. I would imagine the crosstable will return for nationals.



Also: stats for the Eastern Virginia tournament are posted*. [*Caveats: Due to various factors, the rounds are correct but are in the wrong order on the online schedule. That shouldn't happen in future. Also, the scores of the final games are not listed: in JV it was Maggie Walker 260, New Kent B 120; in Varsity it was New Kent A 310, St. Anselm's 220.]

[Mark Wolfsberg]

I think this is awsome -

3 thoughts.

1. Post something on the national page about it so people know to have their devices with them. I suspect you'll see more tablets, as they might be easier to deal with than phones... Also you might want to warn people to be prepared to charge...

2. What will this do to the hotel wi-fi capability ? You might want to ask them if there is a device limit.

3. Use this as a way to tell contestants,judges, and spectators where they need to be now/next

User was reminded to enable a signature --Mgmt.

[jonpin]

While I can't speak officially, things which might come into play at this year's NHBB if I can keep the tab room ahead of schedule include tweeting results updates and standings, then brackets (with room assignments) and scores for the knockout rounds.

[Great Bustard]

I can speak officially, and Jon's right - all of that should be possible, and hopefully a few more features. Jon, Andrew, the others on the Stats Crew (there will be about 5) and I will be working out exactly how this will work over the next six weeks. Once we have a finalized plan, we'll be letting everyone know how it will work, so for now, just know that we're on top of this, and we expect that we'll have a smooth transmission of stats for the Bee, Bowl, and US Geography Challenge.

[tabstop]

The goal is definitely to help with people movement. I've added locations to the team pages (so that you won't have to visit a separate page to see where your next set of matches are) -- any other features that you can come up with that will help with that, or that you think will make the web view more functional, please send along.

[ScoBo]

I don't really have any specific suggestions related to content at this point, but since I actually worked on a similar project last week, I figured I'd provide some suggestions on the formatting/presentation.

Here are a couple of screenshots of how this looks on my phone on initial load:

It would be nice if you could make some improvements to make it more "native" to phones and tablets, since I imagine that's what almost everyone would be seeing it on.

I threw together a somewhat similar website for the NAQT Missouri Qualifier last week, though it only includes the schedule and no results. The non-PDF links go to an HTML page that has some CSS magic to allow it to show differently on phones and computers (mainly that the schedule grid shows up as a table on a wide enough screen and as a bulleted list otherwise). You can resize your browser window on your computer to simulate the "mobile" mode; it switches automatically. Feel free to look at the HTML and CSS if you're interested in some of these formatting methods; for instance, you'll probably want the "viewport" meta tag to get it to zoom the initial view so that the text is larger and there is less whitespace on the right side of the team page (compare the first screenshot above to the first screenshot below).

(Disclaimer: this project is the first time I've looked into formatting things specifically for a phone, and I threw it together rather hastily, so I could certainly be doing some weird/unnecessary/convoluted things)