Federer just recently finished up his 4th round match at the Australian Open.  He barely beat Tomas Berdych in a 5-set match, coming back from 2 sets to love down.  The tide turned though at 3-3 in the 3rd set where Berdych was serving after trading breaks with Federer the past 3 games.  In what could only be described as Reggie Miller-like choking, Berdych made 3 horrendous unforced errors: a pushed shot wide, a pushed volley wide and, the worst of all, an easy overheard that Berdych bounced on his own side before the ball eventually hit the net.  Some might even say he Jamesed it.

From that point on it was Federer’s match to lose.  There were a few more highly contested games, such as the final game of 4th set where Berdych threatened to stretch Federer to another tiebreaker.  But, it wasn’t to be and after taking the 4th set, he cruised to a 6-2 5th set and the win.  The match was surprisingly short at 3hr 28m for a 5-setter with scores of 4-6, 6-7, 6-4, 6-4, 6-2.

But there are bigger fish to fry than this one match.  I’m looking at you ESPN and your in-match scoring interface.  As the new home of all 4 grand slams this year, ESPN also gets to format the in-match scoring however it pleases, but it does not please me.  ESPN have brought their highly annoying website layout practices to tennis now and hopefully they will take the 4 months between the Australian open and the French open to redesign their scoring template.

Exhibit ESPN 1:

-from the iphone

Exhibit ESPN 2:

now the server has changed, so has the order

Exhibit NBC:

Thanks to http://www.daleisphere.com/

The problems with ESPN’s layout and formatting:

1) As with all ESPN content, the philosophy seems to be: more is better.  Here I get the players named twice, first horizontally with the game score, next to the vertically layed-out match score.  Compare with NBC’s example, where all the scores, match and game, are in one box, with the players’ names listed once next to the match score and the text below indicating the game score based on the server (arrowed).

2) The arrow. Technically, with both ESPN and NBC the arrow indicates the server, but ESPN’s arrow never moves.  From exhibits ESPN 1 to ESPN 2, you can see that the server has changed, but so has the order of the players, yet the arrow remains stationary.  This becomes annoying and confusing, especially during tiebreakers.  For example, the 2nd set of tonight’s Federer/Berdych match went to a tiebreaker and since the server changes after the 1st point and then after every 2 points in the tiebreaker, the player’s names and their tiebreaker score is constantly flipping back and forth.  If you look away you’ll think you missed a point, until you see that the score is reversed, or is it?!?

3) The placement, the clutter, the horror.  With ESPN, not only are there 2 scores (game and match) stretched across the screen, but the tennis scores are directly above more scores from all others sports. ESPN is well-known for this global ticker, but to place the in-match tennis scores so close to so many other, unrelated scores is number overload.  Why not place the tennis scores at the top, like NBC, far away from content unrelated to the match.  Now NBC doesn’t have a sports ticker to deal with at all, so they could put their box score anywhere, but that’s no excuse for ESPN who should be prepared to design around their ever-present ticker already.

In short, list the game and match score together, with the players’ names listed vertically and all scores in a row, the Australian Open website does:

http://www.australianopen.com/en_AU/index.html

If you really wanted to differentiate the match score from the game score you could highlight the game score, even though the differentiation is already done with numbers.  There’s no 30-30 set scores people, C’MON! This eliminates the arrow and/or order confusion since the players’ names won’t be flip-flopping, horizontally or vertically and the arrow can move to indicate the server.  Finally, put the score box in the upper-right or upper-left.  There’s plenty of screen real estate, especially in HD and you’re going to eat up  space for the in-match score anyways, so pick a spot away from other content, and scrolling (marquee reminiscent), unrelated content at that.