League Filter (official request)

[FTMSupport]

We actually do use the gmail label metaphor internally now. A league is basically a label on a game, player, or team. You go to League Manager to decide which tagged items you want to show. The split view control could work on iPad, but there is not enough screen space on iPhone for this type of control.

We have found it is much easier support-wise to have a consistent set of management screens across all platforms (iPad, iPhone, iPod Touch, and Android), and that everywhere we differ even a little bit, it causes support issues. For example, with Android, we tried following the paradigm of context menus that other Android devices use, and we get more questions about that than anything else on Android. So it actually hurts us on the support end to have different interfaces for different devices.

[OhioTex]

file manager is one to one hierarchy relationship gmail is many to many hierarchy. iscore already uses a many to many approach..

games are the core of what generates stats.
games can have more than one label (aka leagues).
(likewise players and teams can have multiple leagues)
you are not limited to 1:1 relationships.

Having a drop down "league" menu on more pages (inside Team Manager or Player Manager or Game Manager) or more visibility on a given page as to what leagues are currently active / available - may help but i do not see the gmail label analogy beyond that..

[webshowpro]

I realize that iScore uses the "1 to many" label metaphor internally. I just think it would be clearer to the non-tech savvy folks out there if the user interface reflected that relationship, and took better advantage of that relationship. I suggested UISplitview and the Ipad mail app merely as an example of how the label / item metaphor could possibly be more intuitively - a better example might be the native gmail application on the Xoom tablet.

Anyway, I understand the limitations of small screen size, but the iPhone and android both have built in controls to display this "nested" data. Right now I think everyone agrees its very awkward to go into the league manger - check and uncheck all the leagues every time you want to work with a specific subset of games.

I understand that this is not something easily fixed for the next release. I'm suggesting it as an general improvement on the ui for a later version - much like the first versions of the iPhones Mail app required way too many "taps" in order to accomplish anything - they improved it significantly in later versions. iScore is a lot like that original mail app, and has a very similar data model. Right now it requires way too many taps to do some things - more taps = more room for user error. More user error = more support issues.

Thanks

[FTMSupport]

Thank you for the suggestions. We are always looking for ways to improve. I think we are getting closer when you start talking about the issue being the number of taps as opposed to the storage mechanism or the actual UI. Confusion about how things work is different than wanting fewer taps to do things which is different than wanting to change the way things actually work internally (AND vs OR logic).

We can certainly work to make it easier to perform certain tasks. What is the common task that takes too many steps to perform right now? Maybe if you can give one or two examples of a task you do frequently that is difficult right now, we can start with that.

[OhioTex]

one way to reduce taps, is to be able to get to league choices from where you are, (like misc show starting line up pops you out to line up screen and when done right back to scoring screen.

if you are at a team stat page and a league button was bottom center, you could tap it and up pops list of leagues checked and un checked, make changes and return back to where you were, updated of course if leagues changed.

[PetroGuy]

Assigning multiple games or players to leagues requires a large number of taps. I have a pretty good league structure for what I want right now, but if I wanted to make some major change in my league scheme, it would take forever:

1) Tap Game manager
2) Tap game
3) Tap Leagues
4) Tap next to leagues to check/uncheck
5) Tap Back
6) Repeat 2-6 for each game.

The same goes for assigning players to leagues except that there are even more players. I currently don't use leagues with players because of this. I know I can use leagues to make my player list shorter and as the years go by, my player list will become pretty unmanageable. However, even at this point, it would take me a long time to go in and assign most players to an 'Archive' league. Now, I've just put it off so long I don't want to mess with it.

[FTMSupport]

OK... so use case 1 is "faster way to assign leagues to multiple games at one time".

So maybe in the same way you can currently go to a Game and bring up Leagues, then just check the Leagues that the game is in, we could allow you from Leagues to bring up the Games, Players, or Teams for that league, and just check next to the Game, Player, or Team to add/remove them from the league. So you would be able to assign in either direction.

[webshowpro]

I use the leagues mostly as "stats" filters. I'd love to reduce clicks by simply the "stats" button (on the team page) prompt me for which league I want stats from. Rather than having to back out, uncheck leagues, check others, then return to the team page.

For example, after each tournament I send out stats to the other coaches, for each individual game, cumulative tournament stats, and finally year to date stats. Its a somewhat tedious process to do that, when I suspect it could be easier.

Thanks you guys are doing a great job, I really appreciate the dialog and the effort to make the software better!

[PetroGuy]

OK... so use case 1 is "faster way to assign leagues to multiple games at one time".

So maybe in the same way you can currently go to a Game and bring up Leagues, then just check the Leagues that the game is in, we could allow you from Leagues to bring up the Games, Players, or Teams for that league, and just check next to the Game, Player, or Team to add/remove them from the league. So you would be able to assign in either direction.

Yes. That would be a huge improvement.

[veteranrookie]

I concur, that would be a big improvement. Any idea if this is a possibility and when?

Thanks!