Formatting for Pitching Matchups Tool

[woodyui]

I noticed today that the format has changed for the SP matchup tool. The screen now only shows 4 pitchers (screenshot below). You can scroll down on the right side, but the view is limited compared to how it was previously. Is this a temporary change or is this how it's going to be moving forward?

image.png

[RAY@HQ]

It's a new format we're trying out for tables. The table itself actually scrolls, while the header stays fixed. So if you click into the table and scroll, you will see the whole list of pitchers there.

[woodyui]

FWIW I much prefer the old format. Compare this to the view with Daily Matchups and that is easier to view a lot of pitchers at once. This new table restricts the number of pitchers you can see at one time, therefore requires more scrolling. I feel like this is a big step back in the user experience.

[RAY@HQ]

It shouldn't really be changing the number of pitchers you see at one time. If you put the top of the table at the top of your browser, you still see the same number of pitchers. The difference is that if there are more pitchers off the bottom of the page, you can scroll and see those without losing sight of the header row/labels.

[JonE]

You can also change your browser settings to get more rows on there. When I use Chrome on my desktop at 100% zoom, I see 9 rows; at 80%, I see 12 rows.

The Daily Matchups chart also has a fixed number of rows, because there's a fixed number of games per day. It's easier to design a screen window that always shows 15-16 rows per day. And frankly I still have to scroll to see the whole of the Daily chart.

Under the old format, we still had to scroll the screen when we were looking at 8 days of starts, because that's at least 100 rows long. Any time you have a table that long, there's going to be scrolling. That seems like a reasonable price to pay for eight days of scores.

[RAY@HQ]

I got a lot of questions about this over the weekend. We'll see what we can do to make this new format a little more obvious.

[RAY@HQ]

So, sticking to this topic... I really do think the path we're on makes some of these tables more usable, but definitely acknowledge we may not quite have it right yet.

We made an adjustment today that should allow you to see more entries in the table by default, on all screens.

The next thing we can do, which I think would also help a lot, would be to add one of those semi-transparent text boxes at the bottom of the table, that says something like "scroll to see more data". I think that's the missing visual queue that we need here, but curious to hear from those of you who noticed/were thrown by this change, whether you agree that would help.

Note that while this is only on the SP Matchups table now, we do want to move it to other tables on the site, esp. the Custom Draft Guide tables. So I'd like to get this right/get buy-in on the approach before we make it more widespread.

Thanks for the feedback, much appreciated.