Semi OT: Beta testers for CFB related website

Submitted by rankingstown.com on

I'm looking to get some feedback / testing done on www.rankingstown.com

It's a college football website meant to make it easy for people to create their own computer rankings.  There is a lot of stats that can be looked at without creating a ranking system as well (including a lot of per possession stats)

I turned off the email verification for signing up so if anyone is leery about providing their email you can just make one up.

Any help and feedback would be appreciated, thanks.

MGoBoard
Football

trustBlue

July 26th, 2015 at 5:51 PM ^

One bit of advice from someone who has launched a number of different websites:  Wait until you have demonstrated some value to the user before requiring them to create an account. You'll be a lot better results by allowing users to get started using the site without an account and only requiring an account when they want to do something like save or to share their rankings.

I'm sort of into ranking systems, and even developed my own CFB rankings in Excel, but even I couldn't be bothered to fill out the sign up form without having a chance to check out what the site does first.

It also doesnt help that your signup form itself is waaay longer than it needs to be.  Every additional field you require will create a drop off in your signup conversion.  Right now, you've got seven fields in your signup form.  You should reduce this to two if you can (three at the most). You don't need the users first name and last name, you dont need a password confirmation field, you definitely dont need a CAPTCHA.  They are signing up for entertainment website, not applying for a brokerage account. 

I realized that it sounds dumb that I couldnt be bothered to fill out a form, but yet came back here to type all of this out, but that's how people think. 

Joined: 04/14/2014

MGoPoints: 8167

trustBlue

July 27th, 2015 at 12:56 AM ^

Ok, I checked out the demo.  You're obviously just getting started, so i'll leave out too many comments about usability, navigation, etc.  

I think the idea is pretty neat.  Basically it allows anybody to develop their own criteria to rank football teams and essentially create their own Football Outsiders-type rankings. Getting all the data and building the back end must have taken a bit of work, so bravo for getting this far.

A couple of things that jump out at me:

1 - Its really hard to deal with all of the different stats in humoungous lists like you have now, e.g.:

Passing Attempts Per Game
         Passing Attempts Per Game (Away)
         Passing Attempts Per Game (Home)
         Passing Attempts Per Game (Neutral Site)
         Passing Attempts Per Game Minus Passing Attempts Allowed Per Game
         Passing Attempts Per Game Minus Passing Attempts Allowed Per Game (Away)
         Passing Attempts Per Game Minus Passing Attempts Allowed Per Game (Home)
         Passing Attempts Per Game vs BCS Teams (Away)
         Passing Attempts Per Game vs BCS Teams (Home)
         Passing Attempts Per Game vs BCS Teams (Neutral Site)
         Passing Attempts Per Game vs Teams with Winning Records
         Passing Attempts Per Game vs Teams With Winning Records (Away)
         Passing Attempts Per Game vs Teams with Winning Records (Home)
         Passing Attempts Per Game vs Teams With Winning Records (Neutral Site)
         Passing Attempts Per Game vs Top 10
         Passing Attempts Per Game vs Top 10 Teams (Away)
         Passing Attempts Per Game vs Top 10 Teams (Home)
         Passing Attempts Per Game vs Top 10 Teams (Neutral Site)
         Passing Attempts Per Game vs Top 25
         Passing Attempts Per Game vs Top 25 Teams (Away)
         Passing Attempts Per Game vs Top 25 Teams (Home)
         Passing Attempts Per Game vs Top 25 Teams (Neutral Site)
 
That's just the list for Passing Attempts Per Game.
 
The same basic list repeats for Passing Attempts Per Possession, Passing Yards Per Game, Passing Yards Per Completion, etc.
 
I think you would do better to redo it as series of sequential drop down lists, e.g.
 
Passing >> Attempt/Yards >> Per Game/Possession/Completion >> vs. Winning/Home/Away/Top10
 
To see what i mean, go here and scroll down the Page to the example under "Set 1": http://coursesweb.net/javascript/multiple-dropdown-select-lists-creator…
 
2 - Whether you implement the first suggestion or not, I think it would help a lot if you allowed users to pick their ranking criteria first and then assign weights separately.  
 
The way I would see this is that users select a stat (via list or drop down as above) and then push a button like "Add Stat" to add it to their custom criteria.
 
Once they add their chosen stats, they can then go and add weights to each one.  This would make it a lot easier to adust weights for the stats you actually want to use without having to scroll through page after page.
 
3 - For college football, IMHO its critically important to be able to adjust for strength of schedule.  Right now you have certain stats that show as vs. Top 10 or vs. Top 25 or whatever which is okay, but in reality just about every stat needs to adjust for strength of schedule to really be meaningful in college football. 
 
Its not like the NFL where the teams all play fairly similar schedules.  In CFB their is just too much variability from one team or conference to the next for a raw stat like points or passing yards to tell you much without accounting for the competition. As you have it right now, a team that beats Alabama by 20 points would count the same as beating Eastern Michigan by 20.  
 
So I would think about how you can incorprate SOS adjustments into every stat (perhaps this could be an optional premium feature if you are planning to eventually charge $).
 
When I created ranking systems in Excel, I basically just took the margin of victory of each game multiplied by an adjustment factor for strength of schedule, similar to this:
 
 
If you are familiar with Elo Rating system used for ranking chess competitors, its based on a similar idea.  

Joined: 04/14/2014

MGoPoints: 8167