The app I use at the moment is the BBC Sport App. Because it's not snooker-specific it requires a lot of navigation to find what the scores, and because of the size of the app, it often takes a while to load, which makes the navigation process slow. Despite extensive searching, this is the best app I could find to get snooker scores on.
The navigation process is:
- Open the app.
- Open the menu.
- Scroll all the way down the menu to 'MORE SPORTS'.
- Scroll all the way down that menu to 'Snooker'.
- Open the sub-menu on the snooker homepage.
- Select 'Results & Schedule'.
- Click on the tournament you want to view scores from.
- Scroll through a long page of disengaging numbers to find the particular result you're interested in.
It is easy to see how this process becomes tedious, especially when the process needs to be repeated over and over if you're keeping track of a live game, as there is no way for you to add notifications from snooker.
You can alter the main menu to add snooker to the initial choice of sports, but it's my no means immediately clear how to do this, and all this really does to shorten the process is reduce the scrolling through the menus, which, in theory, only refines the process to the point where step 4 is obsolete.
How I Currently Access Football Scores - Goal Live Scores App
Goal Live Scores is a much more time-efficient app than BBC Sport for accessing football scores. Whilst this is partly because it's football-exclusive, it also takes you straight into football live scores, so doesn't require a menu to scroll through, which makes it much more efficient.
Whilst it's easy to see scores for live games, it's also easy to find results of games already played that month by swiping along the horizontal calendar at the top of the page. This has the drawback of only showing results from the current month, but generally recent results are the ones people look for anyway.
If you can't remember what date the game that you want to know the result was played on, you can search results by their competition through the menu, or, if the game you're after contains one of your easily favourited teams, through favourites.
On top of showing just the result, the app shows different information about the games, including statistics, league tables, line-ups and form, so user viewer can get an idea of how the game happened rather than just the result, allowing for an improved user experience.
Despite the apps questionable aesthetics, it works a lot more effectively than BBC Sport as the process is much more streamlined and the navigation much simpler. If I could create something that follows a navigation model like this for my snooker scores app it would ensure that it was easy to use from first hand experience.
A Less Successful Football Scores App - LiveScore App
LiveScore has tried to simplify the process too much, and in doing so has made navigation confusing by only using icons as navigation points. This is done poorly, as the icons don't make clear what each screen's function is. On top of this, the first too screens have functions so similar, it's probably not necessary to have them both anyway, which just slows the app down.
Scores are displayed over two lines, which makes it less clear immidiately who each team is playing, and the information displayed about each game when a specific game is selected is very minimal, and not in a particularly clear way.
It gives the option to search for results by competition, but it doesn't distinguish between the different divisions in each country, instead grouping them together in an unorganised list.
This app shows how trying to over-simplify navigation can be counter-productive, and there needs to be some element of distinction between the different icons and pages.
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