I’ve been frustrated by many websites in my day.  Most of the time it’s because the site isn’t user-friendly.  It takes far too many clicks to get where I want.  Other times it’s because the design is so ugly and unorganized I don’t even enjoy looking at it on the screen.  On the other hand, there are websites that are a joy to visit.  They make my life easy.  They are visually beautiful, and you can personalize them to the way you want it to be.  The way that these websites work is by the art of interactive design.  I believe that as the Internet continues to develop, the way that a website is designed will be the key to its success or failure.

For this post I’ll talk about the design of “fantasy sports” websites, and why I chose the one that I did.  Fantasy sports are one of the biggest “past-times” in America.  These games are a form of gambling in a way, where you draft a team from any given sport and compete against friends or strangers for a cash prize at the end of the season.  Many sites offer fantasy sports, but the big three are ESPN, YAHOO, and CBS Sports.  If interactive design is connecting people through the products that they use, these fantasy sports websites do a great job at that.  They give you the ability to write on message boards, send emails, create polls, and write articles that will appear on your fantasy sports homepage.

In my opinion, however, one of these sites do a better job at making your life easier than the others, which is why I choose them year after year for my fantasy baseball and football leagues.  That site is CBS Sports.  But what makes it so much better in my mind?  Why do Windows and Mac OS X, which basically do the same thing and can, feel so different? (3)  It’s the same kind of situation with fantasy, because these sites do the same thing for the most part.  It’s because interaction design is about behavior.  It solves particular problems under a particular set of circumstances (3).  My problem was I wanted a site that offered me stats, player information, and everything else in one click.  CBS was the only site that was able to do that by offering a “rollover” when you put your mouse over the word “stats” at the top of the screen.  With that I am able to pick from individual player stats, roster trends, free agents, and I’m also able to compare players.  The ease of choosing form all of this with one click was appealing to me, because it made life easy.  This stuff is on ESPN and Yahoo, but it’s not as easy to find.  This was a major factor for me.  Interactive design’s usefulness comes in it’s application to real problems, and CBS Sports was able to solve my problem; less clicks to get what I want.

CBS Sports also offers me access to my team through my Blackberry, and here I’m able to set my lineup or check my scores on the go. This is another way that companies can use interactive design to help you solve problems.  What if I had forgot to set my lineup and was on the road?  Now I can just hop on my phone and get it done.  Simple.

CONNECTING

CBS Sports also makes it easy for you to connect with friends in your league.  There is a message board where you can post messages, which also go directly to your email address.  You can create interactive polls, write articles, and even do live chat with one another in the “GameCenter.” Interactive design is about making connections between people through the product, not connecting people to the product itself (5).  CBS has always done a great job at this, and it’s another reason why I’m attracted to it.  The website is more about doing things than necessarily reading things, which is definitely the way many companies are designing their sites these days, in my opinion.

DESIGN

The design of CBS Sports’ League Homepage is the key for me.  With Yahoo and ESPN, there were little things that ticked me off, like having to click to a new screen to see the league standings, and so forth.  Saffer states in Designing for Interaction that “it was the small stuff: little things not going well, small irritants that over time made you crazy (10).  I would definitely agree with this.  So what CBS Sports did to make your life easy, was allow you to customize your homepage whatever way you want it.  You can upload your own team logo, change the color schemes of the site, and move different parts of the homepage to wherever you want it to be.  For example, if I want the league standings in the top right of the page and the player news on the bottom left, I can just click and drag these boxes to wherever I want on the screen and they will be saved in that position every time I go back.  Fully customizable, and that’s the way it should be.

This also reminds me of the User Sketches experiment where it was viewed that people who draw sketches of the way they want a website to be gives a company better discovery of what people like, as it is more reflective rather than just stating what you like and what you don’t like.  With CBS, you are able to basically make the homepage the way you want it, and in a sense sketch it the way you see it best.  This is yet another aspect that made the site so appealing.

EMOTIONAL DESIGN

Don Norman also stated in this video about “emotional design” that you need to make things fun.  Emotion plays a major role in human life and allows you to judge the world.  It also shows attractiveness.  I believe CBS Sports does the best job of making their website attractive and fun by incorporating all of the things I mentioned above.  It’s mostly fun because of the many ways you are able to interact with your friends in the league.  Norman also states that successful products should be a pleasure to use, and convey a positive sense of self; of accomplishment, pride and ownership.  CBS has achieved this in my mind by their ease of use and by the customization you can give the site.  Being able to make the site the color I want and set it up the way I want allows me to take pride in my ownership of my team.  It’s my homepage.  Interactive design is all about making the user happy, and this accomplishes that for sure.  David Kelly also has a video that emphasizes that the future of design is human-centered.  Websites are becoming much less about the product and more about the human experience.  I would have to agree on this, because I don’t think I would ever change to Yahoo or ESPN after my experiences with CBS Sports.

References:

Saffer, D. (2007). Designing for interaction. Berkeley: New Riders, pp. 1-68

Tohidi, M., Buxton, W., Baecker, R., & Sellen, A. (2006). User sketches: a quick, inexpensive, and effective way to elicit more reflective user feedback. In Proceedings of the 4th Nordic conference on Human-computer interaction: changing roles (pp. 105-114). Oslo, Norway: ACM.

Talk by Don Norman

David Kelly: The future of design is human-centered (TED)

Garrett, J. J. (2000) The Elements of User Experience