GR1 - BrackeTracker

Stephen Chang, Sarah Han, Samvaran Sharma

User analysis

Listed below are three different types of people who might use BrackeTracker.  We interviewed three people, each representing one of our three different personas:

• the Manager
  • The manager had run a variety of tournaments, both small scale and medium scale tournaments (~10 participants and ~35 participants respectively).  He is most experienced in running small tournaments, being the go-to guy with his friends for setting up brackets for tournaments that take only a few hours to complete.  He has run a handful of medium sized tournaments for larger groups, but is by no means an expert.  In the medium sized tournament, the hardest aspect of managing and running the tournament was figuring out the tournament structure and generating the matches.  With that many teams, there were many different possible tournament styles: single elimination, double elimination, round-robin, etc.  Because of the unusual conditions of the tournament, three-player matches (1v1v1) instead of two-player matches (1v1), he decided that the simplest, yet still fair, tournament structure was a round-robin tournament with one player having a bye to the second round.  At each stage of the tournament he had to manually generate the next set of round robin matches.  The small scale tournament was a simpler, single-elimination bracket.  This smaller tournament was much more well defined and as a result much easier to maintain.  Using a simple whiteboard, players would just write down the winner of each match after it was played.  
  • Lessons Learned: 
    • Generation of a bracket is often difficult without prior knowledge
    • Tedious to have to generate all next set of rounds for large numbers of participants (especially in round robin tournaments)
    • Updating winners/scores easy under certain conditions (small scale tournament with few participants and on a small time scale)
    • Running a longer tournament single-handed takes a lot of time
    • Different set of difficulties in running small and large tournaments.
• the Challenger
• Manager/Challenger
• for people who know how to use a computer and want a quick solution for creating a tournament
• for people of all ages
• need little-no previous experience
•  

Task analysis

There are a few main tasks involved with the Bracketracker.  These tasks include:

• Create a tournament
• Update the tournament
• View your tournament(s)
• Searching for and Joining tournament(s)
• Manage a tournament