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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)
[kml_flashembed fversion="9.0.0" movie="http://www.innovativeinteractivity.com/wp-content/themes/tma/images/posts/ncaa/soundslider.swf" targetclass="flashmovie" publishmethod="static" width="750" height="570"]
[/kml_flashembed]
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Tags: AP, basketball, Los Angeles Times, NCAA, The Columbus Dispatch, The New York Times, tournament, Washington Post Discussion
9 comments for “NCAA Bball tourney sparks great interactivity across the country”
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Hi Tracy,
Just wanted to plug an interactive timeline I built in two days for my newspaper, the Arizona Daily Star.
The University of Arizona men’s basketball team will be heading to Miami later this week for its 25th consecutive trip to the NCAA tournament. It’s the longest active streak in the country (your UNC Tar Heels hold the all-time record with 27).
To commemorate, we pulled stats, photos, historic pages and commentary from our columnist Greg Hansen, who has been there for each of the team’s tournament appearances.
I built this timeline in two days, using code from a previous timeline I had constructed. Would love to get any and all feedback. Go Wildcats!
The Web site for the aforementioned project is:
http://www.azstarnet.com/consecutivecats/
Hi Kori,
Great work on the project. I really like how well designed each section is, with the photos, text and background image nicely displayed in a collage effect for each year.
I would suggest adding some color to the intro page, possibly displaying the most well-known picture to break up the text a bit and draw the user into your presentation.
Also, I would have loved to see some interactive elements within each year (such as links to archive stories, pdf documents, audio clips for a more detailed report from Hansen, video clips from the more recent years, etc).
Lastly, I would suggest separating the navigation from the header either with a subtle font size and/or color change, a thin line or a tabbed effect. The latter would better connect the nav to the content rather than the header and could display which year the user had clicked on by changing its color, etc.
Great job overall and thanks for submitting your project!
Great advice, Tracy! Now that I have more time, I will make some of your suggested changes. Thanks for looking it over!
Hi Tracy,
I enjoyed your tips and found one more that I thought could be useful.
http://www.chicagotribune.com/sports/chi-ncaa-2009-bracket-html,0,2883674.htmlpage
It’s not so much a fill-out bracket, but more of an analyzer.
Great find, Sara! Thanks for sharing this link. I really like how they went above and beyond the traditional bracket in terms of creativity. The drag and drop feature is great.
Again though I wish they had incorporated save/print/email functions once a user made his/her selections. Otherwise, I am a fan of this piece!
Just a style question for you, Tracy.
For the basketball timeline I created, would you suggest linking to stories, photo galleries, PDFs, etc. within the Flash project itself?
Or, would you rather the links go to specific pages on our Web site with that content popping up on its own Web page outside the Flash project (say, a link to a PDF leads to our Web site, where the PDF is the only item on that specific Web page.)
Which do you prefer and why?
Great question, Kori.
Personally, I prefer having everything embedded inside the Flash file. Once you start linking out, it is more likely that the user will not come back to the main interactive. If everything is self-contained, you can also design the multimedia components to fit nicely into your package.
The only advantage to linking out would be for advertisers to put more ads on the extra content. I would stay away from this as much as possible unless you are forced to … and even then make sure you code it so it opens a new tab and doesn’t open on top of the Flash file. (_blank vs. _self)
Hope that helps!
Thanks again, Tracy! Great advice!