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UX Prototype: NFL Standings Tableby@Dane

UX Prototype: NFL Standings Table

by Dane LyonsMay 20th, 2019
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An estimated 49% to 70% of Americans who counts themselves a fan of the NFL.com. I’m sure they’re busy preparing for the upcoming 2018 season. Engaging ~200 million US fans can’t be easy. So I thought I'd take some time to help explore the user experience on the current interface. Here is a screenshot of their current interface, minus the ads, and the new fold. It’s very hard to compare teams. Using so much vertical real estate to represent this data means users only can view a small portion of the table at a time.

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I’m one of an estimated 49% to 70% of Americans who counts themselves a fan of the NFL. I’m sure they’re busy preparing for the upcoming 2018 season. Engaging ~200 million US fans can’t be easy.

So I thought I’d take some time to help explore the user experience on the NFL.com standings screen. Here is a screenshot of their current interface, minus the ads.

The blue line represents what you can see above the fold on my Macbook Pro with their current navigation. If I delete the navigation, the red line represents the new fold.

This isn’t an exhaustive list, but there are 3 primary issues I’d like to address with this interface:

It’s very hard to compare teams

Using so much vertical real estate to represent this data means users are only able to view a small portion of the table at a time. This forces you to scroll up/down hunting for a team. Then you memorize 1–2 relevant data points. Then you hunt for another team and compare your memory to what’s on screen. This is a slow process that breaks down as you try to compare more than 2 teams at once.

The table is too noisy

I seriously don’t think the average fan cares about the percentage of games a team wins within their conference. I consider myself to be a fairly serious fan and the only reason I’d care about half of the columns here is in a playoff tie breaking scenario. In most cases, this extra data is just adding cognitive overhead.

Unnecessary tabs

The 3 tabs at the top just toggle between showing exactly the same information by clustering teams into different buckets. I do find it nice to see teams bucketed by division but there should be a better solution...