APBRmetrics

edeviant · Joined: 18 Jan 2005 Posts: 2

Hello all...

I've been lurking in the Yahoo Group and now over here... this is finally my first post. I've been studying all of your work and following discussions while I've been working on my thesis. The point of my finally writing now is to get some feedback on what I've been working on.

I'm a graduate student at Parsons School of Design (NYC), and being one of the few sports fans here and one of the few with any higher math in their background, I have decided to couple my knowledge of those fields with my knowledge in visual design and my studies in interface design and information delivery by coding an analysis application. It's been targeted towards the management of NBA teams, but I also understand it's potential use by this community and common fans as well as a tool for fantasy sports.

Any way, a short presentation (which my make little sense without it being presented) is here: LINK
It gets a bit of the gist across, even though I have changed some design elements. It shows the simpler stuff I've planned.

I'm trying to leverage the work I've studied in this field with some ideas of my own and leverage a visual language in a tool for analysis. I'm currently building the Windows application itself, where more answers for me will come to the questions of appropriate information delivery methods, but also won't have much to show until I get that under control.

Any feedback, of course, is appreciated. Thanks for all of your time and help.

jambalaya · Joined: 30 Jan 2005 Posts: 282

i see in your presentation text you have some early beta users so they are in the best position to offer feedback. but i am sure others would be interested in a first hand look when you are ready. i would.

i didnt see salary/contract information on your interface but that would be very valuable, especially if you are preparing this as general manager tool. at least current year salary and number of years remaining on contract or all the year by year data would be even better. there are some imperfect websources for this data but maybe some folks here have all the best source data already formatted in their files.

the ability to selectively remove any statistical lines from the display to focus on just a few would be key. looks like you plan to do that. looking at more than a few stat lines at once would be too distracting.

the ability to bunch game data into blocks (5,10, 20, etc.) and present it as bar graphs or another option might also be useful in additional to the flowing game by game lines.

the chamelon search tool sounds like it could be one of the more unique and valuable elements.

the number of design features that could be imagined could grow to fill screen after screen. how exhaustive do you want to make it? are you going to try to keep it sized as a sufficent and manageable model for a thesis or do you want it to grow bigger and live on in the enthusiast world or possibly become a commercial product or pro team tool?

Kevin Pelton · Posted: Wed Feb 09, 2005 2:28 am Post subject:

Very cool. I stumbled onto your blog a couple of weeks ago, and wasn't quite sure what you were putting together. Now I have a better handle on it, though some of it was still over my head.

I like the thinking that has gone into integrating the tool into the decision-making process. I also think the chameleon search is a very important part of the process. If evaluating team performance with/without a given player is to be part of the program itself, that's very ambitious, but certainly interesting.

**Dan** **Rosenbaum** · Posted: Wed Feb 09, 2005 2:46 am Post subject:

I do not know if this is just me, but I could not begin to understand what was being presented.

Mike G · Posted: Wed Feb 09, 2005 7:00 am Post subject:

It's not just you, Dan. I'm looking at something that's either dysfunctional or impossibly slow.

I'd like to only offer encouragement, but so far I can't find anything on which to comment.

That's definitely the Slowest-loading site I've ever seen. And then it doesn't seem to do anything. Maybe I need to leverage the backend.

edeviant · Joined: 18 Jan 2005 Posts: 2

Thanks for all the feedback.

It's currently just a static graphic presentation. There is no backend to the presentation, just some still graphics and a basic underpinning to what is being built. I'm currently working on programming the actual windows application.

The player evaluation tools will be integrated with the tool, and will attempt to predict player movement as well. The informatics which are in the presentation are sketches at best. Salary and Contract information must definitely be integrated into this application.

I do plan on building this application as far as possible for completing thesis, and then continuing after my graduate work. I'm sure that it will be a scaled down version for my thesis, since I must get what works working extremely well.

I'm not sure why the site is slow, it's just my school's server, but thanks again for the feedback. I'll try to post a projected featureset, etc. in a bit.

kjb · Joined: 03 Jan 2005 Posts: 865 Location: Washington, DC

I haven't experienced any load speed problems. I agree that the Chameleon search would be useful.

I'm guessing that as you complete this, you'll include written explanations of what the graphs represent. It took me a couple tries to figure out what the graphic presentations were presenting.