You will notice a new link on your track and field team page that takes you to a new version that we have been working on. The new version includes additional features, short cuts, and information. We are eager to hear your feedback, make a few final adjustments, and then switch over to the new pages soon.
An upgraded photo system is in the works
I love the new format. It's great to see contact info, coach info, and the newly organize formatting. I cannot wait until it become live...great work!!!
Life is full of hurdles...and NONE are impossible.
Sam Barlow High School
I'm luke warm, to be honest. The content is good, but I think it's a step backward in terms of presentation. The new look is very visually cluttered to me, and less information (i.e. past years' results, which I find very useful) is immediately at your fingertips. The top left section (performance lists, season records, etc.) adds a bit of new info, but it seems like a much less efficient use of the space than before and has too many positioning and font variations, making it tough to skim over.
I suppose the current layout will grow too lengthy in time, as more and more years' worth of results are added... (On the other hand, the Show All link presumably is dependent on all those years being pre-loaded, so load time is not an issue, just presentation.) Could the new layout at least show the previous year in addition to the current?
As far as old years/results, meets with results in now have the date bolded, which is a bit overpowering and creates some wrapped lines due to the extra length.
As for contact info, coaches email addresses would be much more useful than school address and phone number, both of which are easy to look up.
Dan
I do agree with what Dan said about the contact info. Perhaps coaches can choose what contact info to be made public...e-mail is often the easiest to use, but if a kid can view the site and see a coaches phone number, I think a lot of coaches would shy away from allowing the use of that. I also like the idea of showing the past 2 years schedules, and love the ability to show all or hide...for page length. One more thing...on staff, would it also be possiblt to designate Head Coach from the other coaches...since they are the one most likely to be contacted? Thanks, I'm excited to use the finished product.
I would love to have a link to email the coaches on a specific team. If I bring up my meet and see the list of the school attending I would love to be able to send an announcement to all the schools that are signed up. As those of us who host a meet or many meets know there are always changes and announcements that need to be made. Having an option to instantly contact all the coaches that will be attending the meet would be great. I agree with all the suggestions from the other coaches as well. Keep up the great work!
Ditto, that would be very helpful.
Coach Garcia
The new page has its pros and cons...
it is very cluttered looking and awkward to navigate.for example: it now takes 2 clicks to get to a meets results instead of 1.
The addition of the prepsportwear stuff is good, but very distracting. (can it be placed on the far right of the page?)can it be removed? (maybe a feature of the site supporter upgrade... ? )
Not really sure what benefits the new page brings. It seems a step backwards in function but probably a step forward on the back end.
hope the feedback is useful.
Thanks (to all of you) for the feedback on the new team page. We definitely want to make it a page that is as helpful as possible, and visually pleasing as well. We've attempted to implement some of your suggestions already (and will be working to improve it more in the coming weeks as well).
Dan Kaplan:The content is good, but I think it's a step backward in terms of presentation. The new look is very visually cluttered to me, and less information (i.e. past years' results, which I find very useful) is immediately at your fingertips. The top left section (performance lists, season records, etc.) adds a bit of new info, but it seems like a much less efficient use of the space than before and has too many positioning and font variations, making it tough to skim over.
Hmm. Definitely wasn't our intent to make it cluttered! This is a concern to us, and we are continuing to brainstorm ways to improve this aspect. We did remove the "Other Sites" box (moved it to top right as "Switch To"). If coaches have additional suggestions, feel free to propose them.
Dan Kaplan:Could the new layout at least show the previous year in addition to the current?
We have considered this, but at the moment plan to stick with one season. We have changed the logic, so that the calendar attempts to intelligently select which season should be default (Based on presence of results, and proximity to upcoming meets). Let us know if you feel the logic should be changed.
Dan Kaplan:As far as old years/results, meets with results in now have the date bolded, which is a bit overpowering and creates some wrapped lines due to the extra length.
Hmm. I believe you are right. I'll look into other options for indicating presence of results.
Dan Kaplan:As for contact info, coaches email addresses would be much more useful than school address and phone number, both of which are easy to look up.
The staff box could contain this info, and definitely needs more work, and more thought. Currently, if the user has been on the forums before, you can click on their picture, and then email them from their profile.
Dave Kilian:I do agree with what Dan said about the contact info. Perhaps coaches can choose what contact info to be made public...e-mail is often the easiest to use, but if a kid can view the site and see a coaches phone number, I think a lot of coaches would shy away from allowing the use of that. I also like the idea of showing the past 2 years schedules, and love the ability to show all or hide...for page length. One more thing...on staff, would it also be possiblt to designate Head Coach from the other coaches...since they are the one most likely to be contacted? Thanks, I'm excited to use the finished product.
We are hoping to add in the ability for coaches to input more info about themselves. The ability to designate "Head Coach" would definitely come with this addition. Tentatively possible that this might show up in the next few weeks.
With this kind of addition, we would definitely give coaches the ability to select whether info was displayed publicly or not (if we even display any of it publicly).
Thomas Grimes:I would love to have a link to email the coaches on a specific team. If I bring up my meet and see the list of the school attending I would love to be able to send an announcement to all the schools that are signed up. As those of us who host a meet or many meets know there are always changes and announcements that need to be made. Having an option to instantly contact all the coaches that will be attending the meet would be great. I agree with all the suggestions from the other coaches as well. Keep up the great work!
As a Site Supporter, you can currently use the emails provided on the Confirm Schools page of a meet to contact individual coaches or all coaches. (Look for the box containing all email addresses at the bottom of that page). Overall, we agree that coach communication needs improvement on the site, but in the meantime the Confirm Schools page does provide the functionality you are looking for.
Rich Macleish:it is very cluttered looking and awkward to navigate. for example: it now takes 2 clicks to get to a meets results instead of 1.
for example: it now takes 2 clicks to get to a meets results instead of 1.
As I mentioned in a reply above, we are definitely not hoping for a cluttered or awkward page. Any specific suggestions for improvement from anyone are definitely welcome!
As far as the calendar, and the 2 clicks, see my next post below.
Rich Macleish:The addition of the prepsportwear stuff is good, but very distracting. (can it be placed on the far right of the page?)can it be removed? (maybe a feature of the site supporter upgrade... ? )
You are correct, Site Supporters have the option of turning the store off on the 'Edit School Info' page, under 'Track & Field.'
Our intention with the store is two-fold: 1. provide a useful service to fans and possibly coaches (the stores are customized with team colors, and team mascots. Custom mascots can be uploaded to PrepSportswear as well, for a one-time fee of $29.99; 2. provide an additional source of revenue for the site. As I'm sure you have noticed, this site has grown much beyond it's original one-person 'hobby' status, yet most services are still provided at completely no cost.
I want to outline some of our objectives with the new page. This may help you in seeing ways in which we can improve the layout to better meet these objectives. Also feel free to propose different objectives.
Provide greater flexibilty for custom content. We've made it so that Site Supporters can now have 10 custom content boxes on the right side. Previously this was all one long column, so it was hard to post more than one topic.
Guide new coaches in the process of managing their team on the site. We get questions from users about how to do certain tasks (register for meet, add meets to calendar, etc.). The new layout attempts to address this by adding "Edit" buttons to the calendar, etc. In addition, when you click on a meet, you are given appropriate options to Edit Meet Info, Register Athletes, Upload Meet, or Edit Results. We believe that these links can be a quick way to navigate through your common coaching tasks.
Provide more calendar info at a glance. The old layout required parents and fans to navigate away from the team page to find meet info. The new layout includes the meet date, location (with a map button, if Address and ZipCode have been entered), Team Depart and Return times, etc. Site Support teams can post team notes here as well.
Make Site Support features more obvious. It seemed that many of our users were not aware of the benefits of site support (many of them, even after they upgraded!). We would get requests for features that already existed, but were unknown to the coach. The new layout attempts to let users know what they would gain if they upgrade, and once they've upgraded, shows them how to use the features. These alerts and messages are not shown to the public.
Thanks for the feedback on this page. Feel free to continue giving us your input!
Look for a Page Tour video overview of this page to be made public later today, or tomorrow.
An easy change that I think would help the new page is a different color scheme. The light blue is too faint, especially where it has white text over the top. The difficulty in quickly discerning titles adds to the cluttered look.
Everything looks like it's pushed down the page more than before... How about moving the school name/mascot/location from below the logo to alongside it? That would not take up any additional space (unless that blank area is reserved for other uses that I'm not seeing), would save some vertical real estate, and would visually tighten up that area by making the page better balanced.
Why put the Performance Lists down in the school section? That's duplicated by the top nav section... Couldn't Custom Lists be added somewhere up there instead of bringing the main nav links down to fill out a new section? (Ditto for the Season Records section. Those links up top are less intuitively titled, though, so the redundancy here is less of an issue.)
The School Records section is a mish mash of looks... It's got the white text on blue background problem, plus links made bold to stand out on a darker blue, basically taking you back full circle to light on light.
Joshua Bowdoin:The old layout required parents and fans to navigate away from the team page to find meet info.
On the other hand, it requires just as many clicks as before to get to info like meet location, plus the additional time of having to scan the collapsible menu for which link takes you to the most commonly desired page -- the meet results themselves. Perhaps that will get better in time as people become accustomed to the new navigation, but it seems to slow down the primary aspect of the interface right now. I do see the added value, though.
Joshua Bowdoin:We did remove the "Other Sites" box (moved it to top right as "Switch To").
Speaking as a coach that jumps around the site frequently, both on our team page and others', I actually think that's one of the more valuable pieces to have over with the school info...
Joshua Bowdoin:Hmm. I believe you are right. I'll look into other options for indicating presence of results.
The old page didn't bold the date, just the results links. Removing the bolding of the dates would eliminate the problem.
Joshua Bowdoin:Currently, if the user has been on the forums before, you can click on their picture, and then email them from their profile.
That has to be a pretty small percentage of users, no?
I appreciate that a lot of the changes were made for increasing value to site supporters. I've mentioned this before, here and elsewhere, and never received a response ... given that much of the usage of the site fits into gray area for sanctioned state rules, I have concerns about schools paying to use the site which could lead to the interpretation of it officially representing said school. It may seem trivial, but so are many of the rules that they enforce.
Does not seem clutteed to me but beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Everyone`s reaction is valuable.
I like the blue, although the white on blue in the right side message boxes could have more contrast. Shift the gradient to a bit darker blue? (and thanks for your patient and successful debugging for us Mac users - I personally like the extra message boxes).
Pictures (for supporters) seems to flow better and are better placed. I`ve tried your prototype on linking the pictures and athletes and races - really nice, but in our region absolutely no principals would allow a student`s name and his/her pictures to appear together on an internet page in which school staff had any association. (It is OK for a newspaper to do so.)
You have a ways to go before the Staff box is really all it could be. Hope you keep working on it because it has great potential. Coaches should have control over what is in here. Personally not comfortable that it jumps to our Forum page when name is clicked.
Calendar default year - perhaps too much finesse with algorithm. As it is, if I am looking at 2009 calender then go elsewhere (edit athletes) then use browser`s back button, I come back to 2008 (probably because we have no results yet). I vote for simplicity: Just default to present calendar year.
I could be in favor of default display to present and past season, but not a big issue for me.
Regarding signing up a new coach. We just go coach Kim signed up for high school. We switched to middle school page, I logged out and we tried to register him as middle school coach. Got message that his account already exists. I noticed that the bar across the top of the page said High School, even though we entered through the middle school page. Perhaps a glitch?
Bruce
We've made a few more changes to the team page. We'll look at making more as well. Thoughts?
Dan Kaplan:An easy change that I think would help the new page is a different color scheme. The light blue is too faint, especially where it has white text over the top. The difficulty in quickly discerning titles adds to the cluttered look.
I've darkened the colors somewhat for the titles. Does this help? I've also tried to reduce the amout of bolding on the page. I realized that I had bolded everything I ever wanted users to look at, which means they try to look at everything at once = doesn't work!
Dan Kaplan:How about moving the school name/mascot/location from below the logo to alongside it?
This should be how the page is formatted (with the logo and school name beside each other). You might try refreshing (force it to pull down stylesheets). If this doesn't fix it, could you send us a screen shot, and browser version?
Dan Kaplan:Why put the Performance Lists down in the school section? .... Couldn't Custom Lists be added somewhere up there ....
It seems that some users haven't learned the function of the path in the header. The hope with duplicating it below was that it would be a teaching aid. (As well as allow them to initially discover the content). I did remove the "Performance List" title. As far as adding Custom Lists to the header - it's an idea we'll have to consider. It isn't a defined number of lists, though (a school can be part of any number of custom lists).
Dan Kaplan:Speaking as a coach that jumps around the site frequently, both on our team page and others', I actually think that's one of the more valuable pieces to have over with the school info...
Somewhat feel that switching between schools and sports is a more advanced feature (not required for initial use of site). In addition, it's current location is a constant. Thoughts? (We aren't completely happy with it's location, either, just trying to reduce amount in left column).
Dan Kaplan:The old page didn't bold the date, just the results links. Removing the bolding of the dates would eliminate the problem.
The old page had two items to bold (School Results and All Results), though, which was where our conundrum came in. I've removed the bold from the Date for now. We may try to come up with another scheme to indicate the presence of results for multiple teams vs. current team. Ideas?
Dan Kaplan:That has to be a pretty small percentage of users, no? (referring to forum use)
It is around 1/3 currently. But you are right. We need to continue looking at the staff box, and it will probably change somewhat at some point.
Bruce Carrick:I like the blue, although the white on blue in the right side message boxes could have more contrast. Shift the gradient to a bit darker blue?
You were definitely right. I've darkened the gradient. Is it better now?
Bruce Carrick:in our region absolutely no principals would allow a student`s name and his/her pictures to appear together
Bummer!
Bruce Carrick:You have a ways to go before the Staff box is really all it could be. Hope you keep working on it because it has great potential. Coaches should have control over what is in here. Personally not comfortable that it jumps to our Forum page when name is clicked.
Agree that it needs more work. Reasons you are uncomfortable?
Bruce Carrick:Calendar default year - perhaps too much finesse with algorithm. As it is, if I am looking at 2009 calender then go elsewhere (edit athletes) then use browser`s back button, I come back to 2008. I vote for simplicity: Just default to present calendar year.
May be so. Let us know if continues to annoy. The problem with going away and coming back to 2008 was actually a problem with the header that should be fixed now.
Bruce Carrick:I noticed that the bar across the top of the page said High School, even though we entered through the middle school page.
Thanks. Will try to look into.
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Thanks for the good feedback, as always!