Interactive examples

NCAA Bball tourney sparks great interactivity across the country

I filled out my first NCAA bracket today (although I am only familiar with a handful of the teams) simply because it was exciting to “play” with the different interactives. I’m pretty sure I changed my mind on every bracket, but if you promise not to judge me (because I am completely biased towards my Heels), I will show you the five brackets I filled out and tell you what I appreciated most about each design.

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.

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.

Los Angeles Times’ bracket was extremely clean and user-friendly. I was able to print my selection, but that was the extent of it. I liked the color scheme, but I guess I am forced to deal with the large BMW emblem in the middle of my prized selection. *sigh*

The Associated Press’ bracket is running on several sites, including The Houston Chronicle. Although they promote it as an interactive, the only thing I was able to do was to roll over each team in the first round to get relevant stats. Capabilities were not built to fill out the bracket, so I am assuming that this was more for a reference and will be manually filled out throughout the tournament. I enjoyed reading about each team, but I am puzzled why they chose to use a light gray for the information. It would have popped more nicely and enhanced readability had they chosen a gray one shade darker.

Similar to AP, Washington Post’s brackets are also limited in interactivity. The difference is that instead of rolling over individual teams, they give information on each game and then links to each team’s stats. I have to admit though that when I tested this interactive, the next button and stat links were not working. They do feature a stellar NCAA database with 29 years of results, and a version of their innovative TimeSpace for basketball coverage, so my guess would be that the bracket wasn’t their biggest priority this year.

Of the five brackets I tested, I saw options to print, compete with others, interact, and engage with mobile versions and updates. However, I did not see several key options:

• Emailing finalized brackets to friends
• A widget tracking your bracket score with options to embed on another site/blog
• Customized links for sharing options (twitter, del.icio.us, digg, etc)
• Incorporating Facebook to create groups, fans, polls, etc

Below is a Soundslides gallery of five screenshots from my different brackets. What other publications are doing interactive packages for the NCAA tournament?

(NOTE: If you are reading this via email or RSS and cannot see the player, please click on the entry to go to the site and see the content)

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