Some very common tasks are annoyingly inefficient in this app. Important pages are buried within subpages, while quite a few actions require too many clicks to get from point A to point B. The side menu acting as the app’s primary navigation counterintuitive.
- It has all the functionality a fantasy baseball app should have
- Extensive league news resources
- Abundance of CBS-generated Major League Baseball news
- The app is not a dumbed-down adaptation of its desktop counterpart
- Some very important pages are hidden
- Too much CBS-generated content on the homepage
- Within navigation, too many confusing page titles (i.e.: What’s the difference between Scoreboard and Standings?)
To get an idea of what other seasoned fantasy players thought about the app, I interviewed 2 groups of users:
5 managers in my league
- Most important aspects of a fantasy site?
- Strength and weaknesses of the app?
5 fantasy player who've never used the app
- Objective #1: Substitute a player for next the upcoming week’s set of games
- Objective #2: Check Roto Standings and choose a team to make a trade with (for more details, see here)
- Discuss Pro’s and Con’s of the app
- There is no home base; the home screen lacks the functionality generally associated with an app that features so much interactivity.
- The reliance on the side menu is cumbersome.
- My Team
- Home
- Scores
- It took a number of tries before any of the users could figure out that the hamburger side menu was the main way to navigate the league.
- Major confusion between Standings and Scoreboard. 0/5 were able to find Roto Rankings.
- Uncertainty in how to view other team’s lineups. Given the choices in the side menu, there were no clear cues.
- Users were looking for more out of the homepage. Tabs and content could have been used for more team relevent information.
- Too many extra taps to find essential information.
The app does not prioritize some of the most important features fantasy managers most rely on. An inefficient navigation pattern and redundancies throughout the app make for a convoluted user experience.
A Homepage That Lacks Engagement
Ideally, the Home should act as a place where the most important features of the app can be accessed. Instead, many of the app’s useful features are hidden within the hamburger menu.
You Need a Good Memory
The app’s lack of hierarchical structure makes it difficult to find what you’re looking for. Whether in Home’s tabs or the sidebar’s list, there are too many choices to comb through for a new user to have a seamless user experience.
- Home and League Home both act as the league’s newsfeed
- Access to essential pages such as team management or standings are of secondary importance or non-existent
- Scoreboard provides live, real-time scoring
- Standings provides the final stats from the last completed day
- Scoreboard has nearly everything Standings has
- My Team is where user manage their team; juggle lineups, propose a trade, add player, and player stats, it’s all done here
- Past stats and in-depth stats are found here
- Live stats from live games can only be accessed for Team Details
- Team Details is either found on Home or buried as a Scoreboard subpage
- Unlike all other important pages, Team Details cannot be found on the hamburger menu
Problem
The app does not prioritize some of the most important features fantasy managers most rely on. An inefficient navigation pattern and redundancies throughout the app make for a convoluted user experience.
A Homepage That Lacks Engagement
Ideally, the Home should act as a place where the most important features of the app can be accessed. Instead, many of the app’s useful features are hidden within the hamburger menu.
You Need a Good Memory
The app’s lack of hierarchical structure makes it difficult to find what you’re looking for. Whether in Home’s tabs or the sidebar’s list, there are too many choices to comb through for a new user to have a seamless user experience.
- Home and League Home both act as the league’s newsfeed
- Access to essential pages such as team management or standings are of secondary importance or non-existent
- Scoreboard provides live, real-time scoring
- Standings provides the final stats from the last completed day
- Scoreboard has nearly everything Standings has
- My Team is where user manage their team; juggle lineups, propose a trade, add player, and player stats, it’s all done here
- Past stats and in-depth stats are found here
- Live stats from live games can only be accessed for Team Details
- Team Details is either found on Home or buried as a Scoreboard subpage
- Unlike all other important pages, Team Details cannot be found on the hamburger menu
Home Dashboard
The web version of the platform’s Home provides a navigational hierarchy to follow:
The objective of updating Home is to provide a snapshot of the leagues most up-to-date activity while intuitively providing access to the platforms most sought after content.
Drop Standings, Highlight Team Rankings
Live Boxscore is found in My Team
Screens
To get an idea of the effectiveness of the new changes, the Uninformed users retested Objective #2 with the updated version. Informed users try Objective #2 for the first time. Both groups are interviewed after taking finishing test.
Task: Check comprehensive standing and find a team to make a trade with
Objectives: 1) View Comprehensive Standing to see where my team is lacking 2) Find a team to trade with 3) Propose trade
- In the 4 minute time limit I gave each user, only 1 of the 5 finished the task. 2 of the users were unable to complete the first objective of finding the Roto Standings page.
- Of the 2 users who were able to complete the task, neither performed the tasks efficiently. It required both users to "try things out" in order to find what they were looking for.
- One of the successful users completed the task in 2:45 while the other finished just under the wire at 3:53.
- The major sticking point was getting to the Roto Rankings page. All of the users looked to Standings first.
- Only one user immediately looked to the hamburger menu for answers.
- Much fewer steps necessary to complete task
- All users were able to complete tasks in under 2 minutes
- Taking all of the league-related links out of the hamburger menu was helpful.
- Anchored tab bars for league-related links greatly improved the users' chances of finding what they were looking for.
