I haven't taken a look at the to-do list for MFN, but I thought I would just throw some stuff out there. It's possible they're already on the list. This are really items that I view as "quick" fixes, and don't address the greater usability as a whole (lots of pop-ups for instance). These are of course all just my opinion, so feel free to disagree.

• Player cards should have stats


• League stats should mirror the recent addition to team stats. The listing style of one stat per line is near impossible to read
  
• Team name included on transaction page


• At a minimum, the coloring by position needs a legend. Even with that, I'm not sure if it is is super useful as it currently exists


• Styles for the message board that actually put bullets on unordered lists :)

Slightly bigger requests:

• Legibility of events in the graphical live game screen thing. Penalties, what they are, yardage, acceptance/rejection, etc. Anything in the little expanding/contracting textbox are wasted IMO. It is hard to look away from the game action, down to that section, parse through the text that is perhaps familiar to FOF players, but takes a while for me to visually parse out, and then look back up at the gameplay to not miss anything. However, the yellow boxes that say "First Down", "Interception", etc are pretty easy to make out


• Team customization. I don't know everyone's reason for wanting to create a "fake" team, but one of mine is to design the logo/uniform/etc. I think you can look at big FOF leagues and see the care that people put into it. It may seem silly, but it will cause people to care more about their team... and be more willing to pay to maintain it. :)


• Auto-set depth chart comparison. A way to see what the coach is suggesting that is different than the existing chart.

And now that I have written all of that, perhaps a better editor. ;)

I agree, but I need to spend some time thinking about how best to do this. The stats that are on the player page will not fit on the player card, so it's going to have to be an abbreviated stat listing based on the player's position. Just something that will take some time. It's on the TODO list, but not on the "must do before launch" list.

The perspective of the home page stats is actually more to view league records and the current players in relationship to the records. I agree, though, now that we have the stat details like we have it on the page, we need those kinds of stats on the home page stat area. I probably need to rename the "stats" to "records" or something like that, and put the more complex stats on under "stats." That's probably something I should try to get in before the public launch, but I really want to add more leagues before the NFL season starts, and I don't honestly think this will be something I'd be able to turn quickly enough.

Noted

I personally think that would be too much, the colors really are there just to break up the listing. You commented about the illegibility of the stats on the home page, the rosters were 10 times worse before we added the colors.

Somehow those got lost, I'm pushing them back in place, should go live soon.


I actually plan to do some rewrites on the game center, I agree with the difficulty to read the play by play but am open to suggestion on how to fix it. I don't necessarily want to interrupt each play with the text if you are watching it more casually, or make you give feedback to go to the next play, so I'm honestly not sure what the best strategy would be to make this better.


This will actually be one of the first roll-outs after the launch, but it will be via custom leagues where the league creator will have control over it at first. I might consider giving individual owners the ability to edit their own teams in a custom league.


Not a bad idea, something I'll add to the feature request list.

So, one of my other issues is this pop-up editor screen. Among other things, it makes it exceedingly hard to refer back to the post I am replying to. I'm actually going to open another tab right now to do so. Also, if it's going to be a pop-up, we deserve a lot more space for composition than this tiny little window. :)

OK, 5 seconds later I just went ahead and quoted your post which is.. ok.. for reviewing. And at least in chrome I can resize the edit box.

The nesting in these quotes is going to get messy, but its probably necessary to keep track.



I actually somewhat hate the player card and the way it pops up, so I wouldn't mind seeing a complete overhaul. I understand the reasoning for the cards, but there's just something I (again, this is obviously just personal opinion) just don't like about them. The closest comparison that I can think of to what you are trying to do that I run into is on the yahoo fantasy sports site. I don't love it there either, but they do a passable job.





If the intention is "records" then I would definitely change the label. However, if that is the intention, it seems to somewhat fall apart when you can switch to a stat and see every player for that. I think if you want a record holder page it would be formatted a bit differently as well.



I'd love to hear what others think, because I just find the colors distracting and meaningless. The colors don't contrast at all, particularly because the default sort progresses as ROYGBIV. I feel like you would be better off with a simple alternating color, gray and white or something. Perhaps I would have to see it, but at first glance the colors seem to imply some significance other than position. After you figure out that is the significance (especially after figuring out that there are two colors per position and a lot of positions with only 2 or 3 players) it really doesn't help. I don't look at it and say "Hey, he's purple, he must be a DT". But maybe that's just me. Perhaps it is because of the muted tone of the colors. I don't know. It really just looks like a rainbow for rainbow's sake to me, though. How does it look without alternating the colors?




I think a first step would be to try the "yellow box" for some of the more important events. Personally I'm not looking at the box on every play. If there is a penalty, I want to know what the penalty was and perhaps who was involved. If there was an interception, I want to know who caught it. Being the pain in the *** I am, I think part of it is to ignore what you learned from Jim. Just because all of the FOF players are used to it, it doesn't mean its a good format. In fact, I would play with some options that ignore the sentence-like structure, at least for glancing during gameplay. I'm not entirely sure what the solution is, I would have to play with some ideas and see if I could come up with something (its possible I can't). At a minimum, bold some key elements in that string. On the far end, try to come up with something that has consistent spacing throughout. Perhaps something table-esque with the type of play (run vs. pass), the "target" (wr or runner), and the resulting yards. next is the tackler/intercepter/etc. I realize this breaks apart on complicated plays. Perhaps it should be a single line for each "Action". But as a viewer I need something I can consistently find with my eye in the same place with the same spacing so I can find it quickly. The random length string where the person's name and action are a different place every time, that bounces up and down based on string length is just impossible to follow.

Sorry, I'll stop rambling for now. :)



Some sort of commissioner control could be ok. Because I don't play FOF and live vicariously through Wade, all I really know are leagues like IHOF that are heavily customized. If the individual users have to pass it through the league creator/commish/whatever, that's passable I suppose.

I found it much harder to find players before the colors. It was really difficult. Once you get used to the colors, they are a point of reference. The best improvement I can think of right now in that regard would be a thickish black box around each position group: QB/RB,FB/WR,TE/DE,DT/LB/CB,S/K,P. That would work sort of as a separator between position groups.

Btw, minor glitch: in the team home page -> transactions, week 11 events are listed first, then midweek 12, then week 10, 9, 8, etc. Seems like midweek 12's should be the latest events.

I like the colors just for the fact of a transition from one position group to the other, even though there isn't a large color transition. Maybe more contract in colors for each position group would make a difference. I agree with lordscarlet that the colors don't jump out at me and say WR or DE etc , but when viewing a list I like it better than black print on a background.

I'm not sure I have a great suggestion. I do notice when I'm looking at my roster sorted by position (QB, RB, TE, WR, O line etc etc) I notice that there isn't much of a change (with my eyes anyway) from WR to O line. I think it might be a bit better if there was more of a change in color from one position group to another.

Maybe some darker shades of the same colors??? would help a bit. For the most part if it stayed the same I could live with it the way it is. I just wanted to comment since lordscarlet asked for others opinions.

So I guess we're inches away from the first ASCII team helmet? :)

Just a thought here...

Rather than hardcoding this we could give a couple of user settings so that team owners can view the game as they most see comfortable.

Some examples for display options could be:
A) Verbose only (displayed under field, the current option)
B) Verbose + Summary Strip (overlay along bottom 1/4th of field
C) Full overlay (in between plays you get a full overlay over the playing field which would include play results along with icons of the plays called.

You could then add an additional speed option that relates to how long to delay between plays so that they can read the output at their preferred speed before the next snap.

Just some brainstorming regarding a more.. trackable.. way of viewing the results of a play. I know you don't want to junk up the screen, but...

1. Ball is snapped
2. QB#10 throws the ball
3. Halo/circle around qb zooms to the bottom left corner with #10 and indicator that the ball was thrown
4. #81 catches the ball
5. Halo/circle around #81 zooms to the bottom left corner, next to #10, with indicator of reception
6. #52 tackles #81
7. Yardage is placed on #81 indicator
8. Halo/circle around #52 zooms to the bottom left corner, next to #81, with indicator of tackle
9. I have a few thoughts here, options of:
a. players walk back to huddle, possibly show personnel changes, to give time to view the summary
b. show an arrow/swath/whatever of the yardage gained, to give time to view the summary
c. simply pause for a few seconds to get the viewer time to digest what happened

Just a random thought on my lunch break. That could be more cluttered than you/anyone wants to see, I don't know. But its a thought.

I didn't look at this closely enough. I really like C, where it would show the play that is called (I think that's what Nero is saying). That would be really helpful. Perhaps the "Summary Strip" is similar to what I was saying, at first read I thought that meant with the same language as is showing in the box.

I'm away tomorrow and thursday but I'll try to do a rudimentary Photoshop mockup for the weekend.