Like every other college student, I'm a huge college football fan (especially the Hokies) and I downloaded the ESPN ScoreCenter to keep up with stats and rankings. While using the application for just a few days, I found many design practices that were so interesting I'm going to devote a blog post to them.

First up: iPhone-ness

ESPN did a great job of following the iPhone 'card-swipe' paradigm. By nature, sports data is already grouped into logical sets like sport, conference, rank, and week. This data flows into the card system very well and really shows how easy it can be to view a huge swath of data in such a small device.

Hidden Scrolling Sections

Since you obviously need to be able to show more than five games on the screen, somehow this app needed to scroll its content. I'm on the fence regarding ESPN's implementation. The designers have made the inner content section containing the game data to scroll vertically, but there is no visual indication that this is possible. This implementation effectively creates two frames around the content, one for the black void that the 'card' sits in and the other is frame of the card (red area) that holds the scrolling section. Based on my calculations, this causes the area for viewing data to be only 51% of the total application real estate.

Modal Popups

When you navigate to a particular game, a modal box pops up with the game's score, stats and other information. What use is a modal box that takes up almost all of the screen? This modal box also contains the hidden scrolling section. I don't know of any other application that has implemented a modal box on the iPhone in this way.

Settings Screen

Two years ago I would have never believed that I'd be blogging about the settings screen in an application. ESPN's designers did a great job making this a beautiful, minimalist screen that easily allows you to pick your teams and get back to using the app. For some reason the thick handles for changing the order of the sections irks me, but I'm willing to put up with it. Overall, I'm extremely impressed with ESPN ScoreCenter and look forward to using this app during the rest of the football season.