Improvements to navigation between dates in Lineups view

[_david_aaron]

Hi Niv,

I know there’s been some scrutiny of Ottoneu’s UX/UI; I don’t find it to be an issue for the most part (I actually like the plain text aesthetic), but there is one aspect of navigation that I think could hugely benefit users if improved: the navigation between different dates on the Lineups page of the user’s Team section. The navigation bar currently looks like this:

There are two changes I would propose. The first is just to add the day of the week to the dates in the navigation menu:

This would be a really helpful guideline for what days you’re looking at and where you are in a week; a lot of the time when you’re planning lineups, you’re thinking about dates in terms of days of the week as opposed to day of the month, and it’s easy to get lost without the day of the week as a guideline.

My other proposed change is to add a calendar icon next to the current day in the nav menu, which when hovered over by the user, displays a calendar from which the user can select the day they want to jump to:

This is just a quick mock-up I drew up; there might be other members of the community with more design experience who could make it look better, but this is the basic idea. One other related thing I was thinking: it would be nice to have a snapshot of the current matchup on the Lineup page as well, displaying the opponent, the current score, and the start and end dates of the matchup.

Let me know if you find these changes viable; I think they would make a huge positive difference in terms of ease of navigation and general quality of life in Ottoneu. Thanks, and happy Opening Day!

[nivshah]

Have you tried clicking on today’s date?

[nivshah]

To elaborate, here’s a post from 2019 about how there’s a calendar that pops up when you click on the current date on the lineup or live page:

Development Update, January 2019

Tonight we’ve rolled out a date picker for the Lineups and Daily Stats pages. This date picker also can be used to set dates when looking at Graphs on the Standings page. On the Daily Stats and Lineup pages, you can click the current date at the top of the page to load up the date picker, and use that to find the date you’d like to jump to. This addresses a Wishlist item from @FinoBall (who now has a Genie badge) and an issue I’ve been tracking since 2015 (!).

Here is how it looks on the site (and has for now 5 years):

Here is a post about Wishlist best practices:

Wishlist best practices

I made this glib comment (sorry @Rob_G!) in a recent wishlist post and I wanted to expand on it a bit to explain why this is a pet peeve for me and how we can all work together to improve Ottoneu through the wishlist, one of my favorite things that we have in this community. The wishlist is meant to be a place for people to either talk about new things they want to see from Ottoneu (look alive, Ottoneu Hockey) or talk about problems they have with the site that aren’t necessarily bugs. General…

I would recommend reading it.

Thanks!

[nivshah]

The Calendar icon has been added to the relevant links on the Live and Lineups page to make this feature a bit more obvious.

I’ll work on adding the Calendar icon to the relevant links on the standings page later this week.

[_david_aaron]

Hi Niv,

@nivshah

Have you tried clicking on today’s date?

I had not. Thanks for your reply, and thanks for adding the calendar icon, which certainly makes it clearer that this feature is available.

I still find that displaying the days of the week would be very helpful, but maybe it would be more work to implement than it’s worth; and if I’m the only person who sees it this way, maybe it’s not worth it anyway.

[nivshah]

You can always click the calendar to get your bearings in terms of what day it is.

[jeffreycschneider]

All great improvement ideas. Thanks, Niv!