Feedback Driven Upgrades

A few months ago we unveiled our new tournament management interface and we also used it in a large tournament as a real test of where we were going. Well we found that we were a little off on some things.

We found that the interface was a little hard to use for more than just a few players (the tournament had 150+ players in it) and adding in players one a time turned out to be a test of patience. Setting up the tournament groups and flights took too long and had many involved steps to complete the action. And we had no way of sharing the tournament with other tournament administrators.

Our Changes

So we’ve gone back to the drawing board and we’re making some changes to the interface. First we’re going to the make the tournament home page a little bit more informative.

Here’s what is going to happen. The home page of the tournament management screen is now going to have a grid with your current tournaments displayed. This will link to a tabbed interface where you can go through and change whatever values need to be adjusted.

Second, you’re going to see a really large button that will take you in a new tournament setup wizard. Creating a tournament just didn’t stand out and now we’re going to highlight this feature.

On the bottom half of this screen you can see your tournament administrators. From here you can communicate with these people, view their profiles and whatnot. To the side you’ll see a link where you can add a new administrator. Clicking this link will take you to a screen much like this one:

Type in an email or a username, find the person whom you’d like to have as administrator of your tournaments and click the action of “Add as Admin”. You’ll now be redirected back to the tournament management home page and your new administrator will be displayed on the page.

Basic Info

Okay, we’ve go the home page redesigned and now we’re going to take a look at the new tabbed interface and how we’re going to build up a tournament.

Here’s the basic setup page. Also known as the first step of the tournament setup wizard. As you can see their are tabs staggered across the top of the wizard. When you’re first creating a tournament these we only activate after creating the general information of a tournament. When you’re editing a tournament each tab will be active and you will be able to dive in and adjust any information necessary.

The general information section is just that. You’re going to set the who, what, when, where parts of tournament. Once you choose the where (your course) you will also have the opportunity to create predefined rounds for this tournament.

Wrap Up

That’s all we’ve got now. Everything is up in the air over how we’re creating this functionality but we’re really working to make it easier on you, the user of GolfStakes.com. Come back again and we should have more information on the remaining tabs of this great new feature of GolfStakes.com.