gingerandjohn.com

The folks at Netcord are resting on their laurels a bit. I thought I'd detail a few things that have irritated me for a long time about Netcord:
* Halfway there #1: It's great that with one click, I can email the team that the lineup is posted. But what I really want to do is email what the lineup is. If you can put boilerplate text in the email, you sure can go get the lineup and put it in there too! Here's what I have to do to see if I'm in the lineup, after I get the email:
** Open a new browser session
** Either pull down and click on a bookmark, or type in the URL (since they don't even put a link in the email)
** Log in
** Click on my team
** Click on Lineup
** Try to remember what week in the season this is, and choose it from the dropdown
** Repeat last step as neccessary
** Only now do I know if I'm in the lineup or not.
* Halfway there #2: The captain doesn't get any feedback when people respond. In my opinion, the captain ought to be getting all kinds of notification about activity in the system, especially for availability and lineup replies.
* Just plain bug #1: the straw triggering this particular spine snap is a bug (probably a design flaw) when lineup changes are made after a player replies. The reply doesn't get cleared out, so the captain's never going to know for sure if a player really knows about a lineup change.
* Just plain bug #2: If you go to http://www.netcord.com/, using Firefox, you'll see this. If you go to http://www.netcord.com/home.asp (regardless of your browser). On Firefox, you get a nice ugly line of VBScript right up at the top, and another one in the login box. People, if you can't figure out how to hide server-side code from a browser, you need to brush up on your coding! Note that IE does hide the script in the browser window, but it's still there in the source on the client side.

Netcord's done a good job overall, and they're obviously filling a need, but Netcord needs to take some time to think about how a web app should work, and how to make the user's experience better. The typical Netcord user isn't going to be that sophisticated in their surfing, if nothing else. I think the fundamental problem with Netcord (as with a LOT LOT LOT of software) is that the application doesn't anticipate what the user probably wants to do. Joel talks about this in his first book, and probably on his site. You have to be careful adding in heuristics, but Netcord has some no-brainer places that will pay off in spades. The A numero uno first top ten priority is figure out what match I want to look at based on the date!!! After week 1, is it likely that I'll ever want to look at week 1 again? Newsflash: No.

I venture that a year from now, I'll be able to see all these bugs still in Netcord. Prove me wrong, and the world will be a better place!

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