At Holovaty.com, Adrian did a review of the interfaces designed by some major sports sites for user picks in the NCAA College Basketball tournament. Although specialized in focus, Holovaty’s observations reveal a number of general insights into web-application design.

• The JavaScript-based interfaces (FoxSports.com and SI.com) both leave out anyone without JavaScript enabled. (The Fox site doesn’t even include a noscript message to let a user know why the site isn’t showing up.) Neither one seems to use cookies, since Holovaty notes that pressing the browser’s back button erases all choices.
• SI’s site goes against basic user expectations by having the user click on an underlined link to choose that team. As Holovaty notes, usually “clicking on a link gives you more information about it.”
• The HTML-based interfaces (Yahoo Sports and ESPN’s plain-vanilla site) suffer less from statelessness and more from the clumsiness of HTML form elements. With Yahoo’s drop-down boxes, selecting a team requires additional clicks to focus, drop down, scroll and select; ESPN requires precise aim for the tiny, closely-spaced radio buttons.
• Most of the preceding interfaces force the user to proceed in a linear fashion: choosing the winners in the order of the narrowing-down field. Some users, as Holovaty observes, like to fill out their brackets backwards: choosing an overall winner, and then figuring out the path the team took to get there. Ideally, choosing the winner of the tournament would activate some logic, partially filling in previous fields in the form. (It’s not clear whether Yahoo’s interface provides for this.)
• One of the interfaces offered by ESPN is Flash-based, and seems to be the ideal interface for an interaction as complex as this one. The four brackets of the tournament (Midwest, West, South and East) — as well as the Final Four — are all accessible from one interface. There are no constraints as to the order in which one must fill out the bracket, and (presumably) the intelligence is built-in. The only drawback seems to be the reluctance of developers to alienate even the tiny proportion of web-surfers who do not have Flash installed.

Finally, all of the interfaces suffer — in my opinion — from a shortcoming addressed by Holovaty in his own JavaScript interface for KUSports.com in Lawrence, Kansas: the lack of a printed version to look at during the majority of time the sports enthusiast is not in front of the computer.