ESPN Sports App
The ESPN sports app was developed to deliver live play by play score updates, sports news, and social application to any sports fan that is on always on the move. The ESPN app covers all sports ranging from the NFL to collegiate sports to international sports and even to gaming tournaments. The app provides easy to use functions and a very simple swipe and scroll feature that gets a user to the information that they want. Using a simple three-tab interface consisting of scores, news, and now, the app allows the user to customize the app to their preferences by choosing their favorite teams and sports to get updates from. Even with these simple to use functions that are tailored to the user, the app struggles to give the user a good user experience as the app leaves out some important functionalities that a sports fan wants and has some broken mechanics that will make a user annoyed.
The ESPN Scores app does what it is advertised to do which is to give score updates. There are many ways a user can keep up with there favorite teams when they are on the move. One function the app allows is a favorite team function. When opening the app for the first time, the user is required to create an account and once the account is made, the user can choose what sport they are into and what their favorite teams are. Once those are selected, the user will get news updates when things happen and score updates when games are being played. The user can also click on the alerts icon which is shape like a bell next to an upcoming game to get score updates too if they do not have a team on their favorite list. The ESPN app maximizes the usability for the the user by focusing around what the user wants, scores from their favorite teams. With the amount of customizations the app allows, the app ranks high in efficiency with the simple design that makes it easy, even for novice users to use.
A problem that I have faced with the score updates is that I do not get alerts consistently, many times I would have to go into the app and take a look at the scores on my own. When you choose what alerts you get, you can choose to get a notification of when the game starts, updates of scoring plays, quarterly or halftime scores, and the final score but these notifications are useless when I have to go into the app to get updates that I expect to get automatically. This is where the effectiveness of the functions that app provides is low. ESPN seems to be gearing towards a simple, easy to use app but some of the functions the app provides is glitch or broken.
A positive thing about the ESPN app is that it covers all sports, but that is a problem too. There tends to be a lot of noise when I use the app to find the scores of certain games. When I want to check the scores of a basketball games that I do not have on my favorites list, I would have to scroll past all the golf scores, hockey scores, and any other sporting events that are going on that day just to get to the game that I want. There are just too many score updates that sometimes it is difficult to find the game that I want. Why would there be a favorites sports section if I still have to scroll through sports that I do not care about just to get to what I want? I recommend that when the user chooses what sports go into their favorites list, those sports shoot up the list of scores so that those sports are the first that they see so they do not have to scroll past irrelevant sports. Having a hierarchy allows the user to see the information that is important to them first so they do not have to waste their time going through a long and extensive list. This way the signal-to-noise ratio is lowered.
Another problem that I have with the ESPN app is when a game is over, there is no full game highlight video. There is always a “Recap” section where a writer will summarize the game but no one wants to read about a game, people want to see footage of the big plays. Sometimes there is a video embedded onto the recap section but the video is always a post-game discussion by the game commentators. In the videos tab there are pregame interviews, postgame interviews, and highlights of single plays. The highlight of single plays tends to be about 10 to 30 seconds long and require you to watch a minute to two-minute ad in order to view. I believe that having a full highlight video will make the user’s experience better because a full highlight video will give the user a quick visual summary of a game and not miss any action.
Overall, the ESPN app is a good app to have when you want to check scores and keep up to date on sporting news. I do believe that over time through updates the app will get better and fix some of its problems. The app features a very simple to use interface that anyone will be able to use and the interface is tailored just for the user.