pro-football-reference.com redesign

My original post was reactionary - you've put a lot of effort into creating the preeminent NFL stats site out there, and the effort is appreciated (I've updated the OP). Still, I think the dual-column format of the main page is confusing, especially since it's really a dual-row/dual-column format (row 1 has the header; row 2 has the historical in column 1 and the current in column 2). It's also confusing that the header layout is different on the home page than on every other page.

I'd prefer to have 3 rows. I just think it would make more sense.
Row 1: header
Row 2: current standings
Row 3: historical linksNo worries on the speed - it takes time, and I think most people understand that. That said, I think you have the right idea to yank the ads until the speed issue gets resolved. It's better than losing the clicks for a couple of months because people go elsewhere.

Thanks for the feedback.

What issues do you have with the site design specifically? The front page is still going through some design interations, and is probably two or three iterations from a final design. Our challenge is to bring forward the dozens of additions we've made to the site.

Just curious, What comments and changes would you make to these pages?
Sorry, the spam catcher won't let me post links.
The team index, the Redskin index and 1991 team pages, the Art Monk page.

We try to incorporate whatever feedback we can use.

I know that a lot of people liked the simpler preformatted text layout, which is the way I've designed for years. There were a couple of reasons for changing to tables. You can sort the tables very easily. Click any table header and the table sorts. It is more usable for mobile devices and for sight-impaired users as well.

I just don't see that big of a difference between the stats pages on ESPN and PFR.
Is it the green color?

Also, I apologize for the slow load times. Our ad company needs to pick up the pace. We'll get on them about that.

sean

Sean,

Let me just start off by saying it's pretty damn cool that you would actually come here and solicit feedback. That gives you high marks in my book, not that you'd really care. ;)

I don't usually consult for free, but I think it's cool that you'd come here and actively solicit feedback, so I'll throw in my two cents. I'll highlight some of the larger issues and try not to nitpick too much. As something of a side note, I do user interface design for a large media company, so I may be a bit more picky than most given that I do this kind of crap 60+ hours a week.

1. Navigation
The primary navigation gets completely lost in the shuffle for several reasons: the black background of "Football History" and "2007 NFL Standings" dominates from a color and size perspective and the eye is drawn there first, there is little to no whitespace or negative space separating the elements, and the navigation is not consistent, i.e. it's in one position on the splash page and in another on interior pages. All of this combines to make the main navigation hard to find, difficult to use, and lacking in continuity. If your navigation has the slightest issue you risk losing your users, lose your users and they're going to go somewhere else.

2. Advertising
The leaderboard ad spot (the 728x90 at the top) really lacks continuity with the rest of the site and is sort of "floating" by itself. It also does not visually align with any other element on the page and breaks the user's natural eye flow.

3. Visual Precedence
There is really no apparent hierarchy or precedence with respect anything on the page. What should I do first? Click on Players? Sporting News? Football Memorabilia? Should I search because the search button is one of the larger, more colorful elements? If so what am I searching for? Names? Games? Years? All of the above? Essentially there is no implicit direction as to what the user should, would, or could do on the site, as well as there being no explicit direction like "Hey click here to do such-and-such." The user is, by and large, left to figure out what to do by trial and error.

4. Overall Look and Feel
To be quite honest, my first thought when the site loaded was that something went wrong and a stylesheet got dropped. It just looked to me like something was broken. After refreshing a few times and looking at the code it became obvious that wasn't the case. Please don't take any offense to this as it's purely constructive professional criticism, but visually the site says to me "I haven't been updated since 1997." The colors are pretty bland and flat, the overall layout and architecture is pretty jumbled and the typography is pretty much nonexistent.

5. Whitespace / Negative Space
Whitespace is just the space that's between everything - it's not necessarily white, so some just call it "negative space." Everything feels very crammed together - there's very little padding at the outer edges, between text and borders, elements and other elements and around the navigation. It makes it difficult for the eye to separate what's important from what's not and it's tiring.

6. Deprecated / Outdated Code
I just gave it a cursory look, but it appears that you're using tables for presenting data that's not tabular in nature which is a real "no-no" nowadays. You're also using inline CSS which is nice in the moment but a real headache later on when you change things. Also, the semantics are ok in some areas and really lacking in others. Lastly, while it's not really right or wrong, the code changes between uppercase and lowercase with very little consistency. To be quite honest I haven't seen all uppercase HTML in years.

Out of curiosity, what is the backened database built on and what language(s) are you using to present the data?

Sean, I hope none of this comes across as overly negative or harsh. To be quite honest if I didn't care and didn't think you have a pretty cool idea going, I wouldn't have just spent the last 20 minutes typing all of this up.

Like I said earlier, the concept is awesome and the data seems almost unparalleled. The options are really limitless as to what you could do with it. It could really use, in my opinion, a serious ground-up reworking of the visual design and information architecture. The sky's the limit, in my humble opinion.

One last thing: a study by UCLA several years ago found that over 80% of internet users will make a judgment about a companies reputation, reliability and capability based solely on the look and feel of their website, and will do so in a matter of seconds. Basically you can have the coolest features, the best data and niftiest business in the world, but if you can present it well pretty much no one will care to even look. On the flip side, present something that people love to look at and can use easily and at the same time have awesome features and data and you'll have so much traffic that advertisers will stab each other in the back just to get featured on your site.

Like it or not we live in a visual world and people judge what they see.

Hence the reason guys like me have jobs ;)

on this page:
Clinton Portis Statistics - Pro-Football-Reference.com (http://www.pro-football-reference.com/players/P/PortCl00.htm)

clinton portis's Y/G are messed up (says 277.3 Ypg in washington and 193ypg in denver, which are at least double the yearly ypg, which, of course, makes absolutely no sense). Same issue with receiving yards. career seems right, but the team breakouts are way off.

not sure if that page is wrong or it applies to other pages, but it seems kinda weird.

btw, i do love your site's info... finding stats on the old guys is soo hard elsewhere.

It's almost right - it's just not dividing by the number of years.

UPDATE: The owner of PFR weighed in below with more info on the new layout. Turns out I may have been a bit reactionary. It's not "awful" (sorry about that), but it does need some tweaking till it's as usable as the old version.

Anyone seen the new site? It's awful. It takes forever to load, and it's too cluttered now.

Pro-Football-Reference.com - Professional Football Statistics and History (http://www.pro-football-reference.com/)

I like the new player pages better than the old ones, but it's a pain in the ass to navigate to them.

Not sure about the rest of you, but my load times are extremely fast. I do have a fast computer, but I have not had any troubles...I don't mind to new look either.

Sean, I hope none of this comes across as overly negative or harsh. To be quite honest if I didn't care and didn't think you have a pretty cool idea going, I wouldn't have just spent the last 20 minutes typing all of this up.

Like I said earlier, the concept is awesome and the data seems almost unparalleled. The options are really limitless as to what you could do with it. It could really use, in my opinion, a serious ground-up reworking of the visual design and information architecture. The sky's the limit, in my humble opinion.

One last thing: a study by UCLA several years ago found that over 80% of internet users will make a judgment about a companies reputation, reliability and capability based solely on the look and feel of their website,

Thanks for the free advice. Are you referring almost entirely about the front page? If so, that's fine. As I've said elsewhere, the front page is going to be iterative and we'll get it right eventually. Given the amount of time I've spent on the front page, I'm not upset that you feel there are issues.

We've spent a lot more time on the interior pages and will get the front back up to speed soon enough. Most of our traffic actually comes in through search engine referrals to non-front page traffic.

I would be curious if you felt there was a lack of navigation throughout the site. Our sites have been cited in Rosenfeld's books, so I'm concerned that you feel there is a problem there.

The inline css is purely on the front page as that is the only place they're needed and changing them won't be a problem there.

We are using stylesheets everywhere else and no tables on those pages, except for, you know, tables.

I'm guessing the study you are talking about is the Stanford Web Credibility project. I can't post a link since I'm a newbie here.

Do you mean information architecture (folder structure/grouping of pages/linking of one page to the next/workflow, etc) or the front page layout. Would you really group the site pages differently?

We use perl mysql to build the pages. Most everything is static html.

Not sure about the rest of you, but my load times are extremely fast. I do have a fast computer, but I have not had any troubles...I don't mind to new look either.

There was initially a problem with the ads taking forever to load (10+ seconds). It does appear to be fixed now.

Thanks for the feedback.

What issues do you have with the site design specifically? The front page is still going through some design interations, and is probably two or three iterations from a final design. Our challenge is to bring forward the dozens of additions we've made to the site.

Just curious, What comments and changes would you make to these pages?
Sorry, the spam catcher won't let me post links.
The team index, the Redskin index and 1991 team pages, the Art Monk page.

We try to incorporate whatever feedback we can use.

I know that a lot of people liked the simpler preformatted text layout, which is the way I've designed for years. There were a couple of reasons for changing to tables. You can sort the tables very easily. Click any table header and the table sorts. It is more usable for mobile devices and for sight-impaired users as well.

I just don't see that big of a difference between the stats pages on ESPN and PFR.
Is it the green color?

Also, I apologize for the slow load times. Our ad company needs to pick up the pace. We'll get on them about that.

sean

Thanks for stopping by. Your site is an incredible resource. Keep up the good work!

Thanks for the free advice. Are you referring almost entirely about the front page? If so, that's fine. As I've said elsewhere, the front page is going to be iterative and we'll get it right eventually. Given the amount of time I've spent on the front page, I'm not upset that you feel there are issues.

We've spent a lot more time on the interior pages and will get the front back up to speed soon enough. Most of our traffic actually comes in through search engine referrals to non-front page traffic.

I would be curious if you felt there was a lack of navigation throughout the site. Our sites have been cited in Rosenfeld's books, so I'm concerned that you feel there is a problem there.

The inline css is purely on the front page as that is the only place they're needed and changing them won't be a problem there.

We are using stylesheets everywhere else and no tables on those pages, except for, you know, tables.

I'm guessing the study you are talking about is the Stanford Web Credibility project. I can't post a link since I'm a newbie here.

Do you mean information architecture (folder structure/grouping of pages/linking of one page to the next/workflow, etc) or the front page layout. Would you really group the site pages differently?

We use perl mysql to build the pages. Most everything is static html.

I think there's a bit of a problem if you're essentially viewing the front page and interior pages as almost separate entities. The ultimate goal is to design an interface that's consistent across all pages and allows the user to function identically on any section of the site. Saying that "we'll do it one way here, and a different way there" with respect to an interface is extremely problematic.

Imagine if when you got in your car in the morning and everything was as you expected but when you put the key in the ignition and turned it on, all of a sudden the steering wheel moved 2 feet to the right, the radio was in the roof and the seats moved back a couple of inches. You'd be pretty pissed I would imagine.

I would agree the front page needs a lot more work than the interior pages, though I would still say the interior pages are bland at best.

Getting the global navigation straightened out would be your #1 priority I would think. Fix that and at least people can find their way around regardless of how "pretty" things are. Having the navigation change size and positions from the front page to the interior pages is akin to having the front door handle of your home in a different spot and turn a different direction every time you come home, and then your home builder expecting you to just adjust and enjoy it.

With respect to the information architecture, I've only spent a matter of minutes with your site and I suppose it's entirely possible that the architecture is rock solid but the interface is bad enough that I can't really tell. Not being more familiar with your site, it's hard to say.

I've read some of Rosenfeld's books and they're pretty decent. I'm not sure if he's mentioned this current site design or older ones, but while he is an information architecture pro I would say his grasp of visual design is mediocre at best.

I suppose a lot of this boils down to perception, though I would argue that there are many concrete, well established ideas with respect to visual design and usability. Being a designer I'm going to be pickier and more critical than most. My team just spent the last 18 months redesigning 19 of our sites, 11 of which are currently nominated as finalists for design, architecture and usability categories in their respective media groups. As successful and imitated as our designs have been, I look back now and think to myself, "Man, we can do WAY better than that!"

Have you done any usability testing with focus groups or personas at the very least? Just as a casual anecdote I showed the site to three of my colleagues here at work (with about 45 years of combined design experience) and the general reaction was "Yikes, that's bad." I also showed it to my wife at home (not a professional, more of just a casual user) and her reaction was "That's really boring."

Again, I intend no offense. I suppose a lot of this is really only relevant depending on what your goals are. I personally look at the data you have and think that if you could take an interface that from a design and usability standpoint could put ESPN, NFL, Sportsline and Foxsports all to shame, and put that on top of the current data model and you've got a product that could very well dominate the sports data/statistics world online. Pretty exciting if you ask me.

Imagine if when you got in your car in the morning and everything was as you expected but when you put the key in the ignition and turned it on, all of a sudden the steering wheel moved 2 feet to the right, the radio was in the roof and the seats moved back a couple of inches. You'd be pretty pissed I would imagine.

Are you kidding? That would be awesome - I'd have a Transformer!