Yesterday I tweeted on my Twitter stream
“Number of product roll-outs does not equate to product innovations. Most times, it works the opposite” [link]
And today I found this website, still in beta, in my RSS streams – FootyTube, as if to prove a point regarding the above. FootyTube is an aggregator site with an engine that trawls the open web and gathers football related content in the form of videos and articles and republishes them into, yes, FootyTube. Better yet, the value of FootyTube is the categorisation and channels it creates out of the jumbled up, perhaps noisy search data that gets returned form these searches.
I’m pretty impressed by what FootyTube has done in terms of organising these disparate, mixed up data and turning them in visual-information gems.
Website is in beta. You’d need to be a registered member to view videos. (I registered) Here are some screenshots. And my annotations/review.
First off. Page is long. REALLY long. That’s undeniable. Yet, it’s a joy to scroll through it.
There are many schools of thoughts here – which is better? shorter or longer page. There’s no proof to either one and opinions differ.
My simple answer to this is… USABILITY.
How user friendly can a site be by being short or long? By forcing a page to be short, will it force content to be cramped? Thereby leading to confusing multiple nested navigation? Or by making it long, will it lead to overpopulation of content? Plus never judge a website’s usability by looking at the entire screenshot of a page. The user WILL NEVER see the entire page. Instead, the user will see snapshots of the page. The size of the snapshot depends on screen resolution. The larger the browser window, the larger the snapshot. However it is, it’s still a snapshot. What’s important in usability is getting content right within each snapshot.
In the case of FootyTube, although it is long, having large image thumbnails and large typography makes the site visually enticing as well.
Video view page. Data visualisations. And of course content.
This is the the truth now with the web – how well can information be linked and how well can they be presented? Beyond content (which is a given since that is the first purpose of any website), what is the value-add that this website has? It’s data visualisation. Check out the match statistics and opinions. Smarter still… check out the disclaimer below their video panel.
More data visualisations in Channel page below.
Notice the last line of the screenshot – “From Google News using Query: “Manchester+United+Football”.
Ideas perhaps for our future video channels?
Their “What’s Popular” page. Simple, uncluttered and to the point. May not appeal to some of you but it’s very usable.
Oh look. No “we recommend this” items either. Insight being… If these are already popular content, why need to recommend other things that does not fit the the popular category?
Totally agree