

Ask HN: Please review my webapp. - ssing

The website is for cricket fans.<p>http://doosracricket.com/<p>For reviewing this app, consider it similar to Baseball. 
More details at: http://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cricket
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cheald
Fair warning: Most of this is criticism (constructive, I hope). I'm American
and not much of a baseball fan, so I'm certainly not your target audience, but
I can give feedback on my impressions. I'm not trying to tear it up - I just
want to be helpful. I'm a developer more than a designer, so take my design
feedback with a grain of salt.

Initial impressions: I'm not wild about the color scheme. The green background
in particular sort of messes up the contrast of the rest of the design. The
"learn more" link is barely visible on that yellow background, which is
probably going to cause conversion problems. Try something like this:
<http://colorschemedesigner.com/#2v51T2GtNw0w0>

You're billing this as a social tool, but you're missing the biggest potential
social leg-up - logging in with Facebook/Twitter. You get social connections
and reach baked in with that; doing Yet Another Proprietary Login is going to
hurt conversions and make mapping your own piece of the social graph harder
than you need to.

Paddings are inconsistent - the "Predict/Join" button is indented more to the
right than other elements relative to box edges. "Overall Standing" has more
padding up top than similar elements. This leads to it feeling a bit sloppy.

I've got a horizontal scroll bar at 1920x1200, but can't figure out why. Minor
annoyance. Sidebar boxes are different widths, which detracts from the page
layout.

Inconsistent fonts - serif in some places, sans-serif in others - are
distracting.

From a code perspective, the page is littered with inline styles - you'll find
it a lot easier to manage moving forward if you do all your styling in a CSS
file via class selectors. I highly, HIGHLY recommend Compass + Sass for this -
it will streamline style management like you wouldn't believe. It'll also get
you a 960 grid to work on, which can help address a lot of your
alignment/padding issues.

I have no feel for the market for this sort of thing, but my hunch is that if
you can really drive home the social aspect of it - friendly competition
between friends - you might have a neat app on your hands. Add in some
trophies or badges or ranks or something - you are solidly in "gaming
mechanics" land here, capitalize on them to really make the product fun and
addictive.

~~~
ssing
Thanks for detail insight. Will keep me busy during the holidays. Integration
with Facebook is definitely in pipeline. Was thinking of rewarding the winners
but wasn't sure if it would be legal. Had asked HN few days back and currently
it is on hold. The discussion is at
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2017757>

------
krainboltgreene
Could use a designers touch. Lots of little things, mostly.

Does anyone else see Facebook api stuff as a blight on pages? As soon as I see
that stale light blue...

~~~
ssing
Thanks. Agreed on the design that it needs improvement. Could you please
elaborate little more. Might be able to fix few. Will replace the Facebook box
with a button.

~~~
krainboltgreene
Color and layout were the biggest things. Pick some colors that work well
together (Darks, lights, cool, warm, etc)

------
revorad
This looks interesting. Awesome name.

First things first: when you get so much "feedback" on design and almost
nothing on the actual function of the app, your alarm bells should start
ringing. You are either asking the wrong people for feedback (highly likely
considering most people here don't know cricket) or you are not really
offering anything interesting.

Get rid of the name fields on the registration form. Add Twitter and Facebook
logins.

Have ONE call to action on the homepage. Tell me what this is and ask me one
thing to click. Anything more is overload and distraction.

So after I logged in, I went to the HN test match page. I clicked on
Cast/Change Predictions, selected my predictions and clicked on close. None of
those got saved. When I clicked on Cast/Change Predictions again, they were
all reset.

"Contest" doesn't sound like the right word. Think of something more relevant
to cricket.

On your "Start a Contest" page, why don't you add Flags of countries which one
can drag and drop to make a match. Over time, you could add a list of upcoming
international, national and domestic league matches.

Have a look at <http://smarkets.com> and see what they are doing right. Use
the site to see how it works. I used it during the football world cup and it
was effortless. I had never used a betting site before.

This is a huge market, so you've done well to start. But try and talk more to
hardcore cricket fans rather than us programming nerds.

~~~
ssing
Thanks for the feedback. You don't have to register to join the contest. The
idea was to show a preview of the contest before joining, hence those extra
clicks.

On your "Start a Contest" page, why don't you add Flags of countries which one
can drag and drop to make a match. I think you meant "Start a Private
Contest". This feature will help you create only instance of the current
contest for your private network. You cannot add or delete matches.

~~~
revorad
I didn't mind registering. In fact, I wanted to check out your registration
process.

Sorry I misunderstood the contest thing.

Maybe you should add a slideshow or video demo to the site.

~~~
ssing
Sorry it was a mistake on my part. I saw that I was missing the word private
before the contest. Will address it.

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huertanix
I have a reputation for being a bit harsh about design critiques, so before I
say anything:

* Great work on taking the time to build something cool.

* Awesome work at keeping the functionality simple, intuitive and easy to use. Most people fail at pulling that off.

* Much props for asking for feedback.

...as for the design...

* Some boxes have sharp corners, some have round. Pick just one for a uniform look. You can put stuff like the Facebook fan widget inside a section with rounded corners.

* Doesn't fit in a width of 1024px.

* That green background is hideous and is causing me much gnashing of teeth.

* The logo doesn't seem to fit the rest of the page, in style or in size.

* What is that giant empty blue bar between the header and body of the front page supposed to be doing?

* Some of the small rounded boxes with text in them ("World Cup 2011 Contest coming soon") are center-aligned, but off-center.

* Heading on the left nav bar on the match page could use more uniform spacing so that the match name (sort of redundant) doesn't look like its trying to break free from its rounded div prison to re-join its slightly larger twin to the right.

Other than that, looks great.

~~~
ssing
Thanks the encouraging feedback. Will work on fixing the UI.

------
corin_
"For reviewing this app, consider it similar to Baseball."

I suspect that, in particular when it comes to understanding scores, that fans
of either game would be quite confused about the other.

Coincidentally this is my second comment in a row on HN that quotes an old
Aaron Sorkin show (this time 'Sports Night', a two-series show from a decade
ago that remains one of my all-time favourites), so apologies in advance:

    
    
      (talking about a player who took all ten wickets in an inning)
      JEREMY It says if you compared it to baseball, it'd be like pitching three perfect games on three consecutive days.
      CASEY Really?
      JEREMY Not exactly.
      CASEY Why not exactly?
      JEREMY It says the final four batters scored 16 runs.
      CASEY Doesn't sound good.
      JEREMY It certainly doesn't sound perfect.
      CASEY Right.
      JEREMY In baseball, if the final four batters scored 16 runs, it's be hard to consider that perfect.
      CASEY Right.  Jeremy, I don't know how comfortable I am reporting a story I don't understand.
    

Rather than thinking of it as baseball for the English, I'd suggest reading
that wiki page linked to.

And FYI, both baseball and cricket are great games, but from my experience...
if you like cricket, go learn about baseball and watch a few games, it's
fantastic. If, however, you're a baseball fan, you'll probably find cricket
far too slow and subtle to keep your interest for long, though I'm sure there
are people who've learned to love it.

~~~
ssing
Cricket has also evolved. Now they have 20-20 which is fast and less time
consuming. Also, test matches (5 day match) has more results than in the past.

~~~
corin_
Personally I'm not a fan of Twenty20, having been a cricket fan since I was
young I grew up watching test matches, so it just feels like an
Americanisation of a more traditional sport.

Slightly ironic given I'm actually a bigger fan of baseball than cricket now,
but my order of preference would go baseball > test match > twenty20.

Side-question: What country are you from, i.e. where does your interest in
cricket come from?

~~~
ssing
I am from India but currently in Portland, US. In the past I used to skip
office to watch cricket match. Now I mostly follow it through cricinfo.

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plnewman
Lots of little ui issues -- low contrast in places, boxes that don't quite
line up.

I'm reluctant to actually go in and try anything because I don't want to mess
up the data your users already have there.

~~~
ssing
Please try it out. I created a "Test Contest for HN users"

------
ssing
Click-able link: <http://doosracricket.com/>

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joshma
I get all kinds of crazy widths in chrome - check the width on your elements.

~~~
ssing
I just checked it again. Looks ok to me. Any one control in particular. Any
one else seeing the same issue.

