First time user thoughts

[ralphcurry]

This might be a combination support and feature request. But as we like to say where I work, even if it is a support request, there might be a feature need for some documentation

The application is awesome, and got really good responses from everyone I showed it to at our Little League game. So all my ideas are Little League specific, but I believe you have a big market there if you chose to add special feature to streamline some scoring rules.

I started out by grabbing two old paper score sheets and entering them, just to get an idea of the basics. Here are my issues related to that:
1) The default name generation is a little hard to use. I think it would be nicer if you chose the date through a date picker and then chose the teams and have iScore compose the default name from those 2 pieces of information.
2) I entered the lineup as on the paper provided by the coach. Then when the game got to the 5th batter, the 6th batter was there. Turns out batter 5 was late and hadn't arrived yet. I skipped the batter without him being out. In inning 3, batter 5 arrived and the coach added him to the bottom of the lineup. I discovered this when iScore thougt we were at the top of the lineup, but a new batter was at the plate. I went to the lineup page and dragged batter 5 (which I'd just been skipping thus far) to the bottom and returned to the scoring page, but it was still at the top of the lineup instead of the new bottom. What's the correct way to handle that situation?

Feeling like I had a grasp of the basics, I scored my first live game, here are my thoughts there:
1) There is no visual indication of foul balls for the current batter. Once the batter has two strikes, I cannot be sure if I pressed the foul button or not.
2) After each half inning, the UI immediately advances to the next half inning. That's nice, but right at the end of the inning, the official score keeper would say something like "that 34 pitches for Johnny, right?" and I'd have to shrug and say "I don't know". I could get it by going to the stats page, but that's a bit of work when I'm already scrambling to figure out which players are where on the field before the umpire calls the first batter up. Maybe a half-inning summary page, or find a way to squeeze in the batting team's pitch count for the last pitcher on the screen too.
3) I wasn't sure how to record two runners scoring on a single error as opposed to two runners scoring on 2 errors by the same fielder. Like a bad throw from 1-5 letting two runners in as opposed to a bad catch from 2-5 letting a runner in then a bad catch from 7-5 letting another in.
4) Have a way to enter the fielders' proposed position for each inning before the game starts as opposed to scrambling to enter them during the game.
5) Have a dynamic lineup discovery. Like just enter lineup as unknown then as each batter comes to the plate, have it query for who's next. Then after one time through the lineup, it's known.
6) It'd be nice if the default innings per game was more global in nature as opposed to being a per-game option.

After looking at the email and score sheet pdf, I had the following toughts:
1) It's be nice to have H/R/E per inning as opposed to H/R per inning and H/R/E for the game.
2) The way the fielders' positions are encoded on the score sheet, it's ambiguous if they played the same position for multiple innings, or sat on the bench one inning. In this case, one player played 3B for innings 1,2,4,6 and LF for inning 3, and was on the bench inning 5. We'd code that as a string like "5-5-7-5-X-5" on our paper sheets, but is 5,1;7,3;5,4;5,6 on the score sheet. The gaps are ambiguous as to if the player played the same position as the previous inning or was on the bench.
3) It would also be nice to have a league age attribute for player and put that on the score sheet too. League age wouldn't necessarily require the DOB, just have a "roll calendar" button somewhere in the options screen.

Lastly:
1) A post game editing feature. I scored a play as a catching error from 1-5 when in fact it was a throwing error from 1-5. So the error was assigned to the wrong player. Maybe in the game play-by-play, you could click through and fine-tune/modify the information after the game?
2) A league hierarchy of players and level specific rules. In our league we have AAA, Coast, Majors and Juniors. AA, AAA, Coast and Majors are 6 inning games, Juniors is 7 innings. AA, AAA and Coast have a 5 run limit in all innings but the 6th. AAA has a limit of 2 base-on-balls per half inning, so ball 4 on the third walk brings the offensive coach to the mound. So an easy way of scoring ball 4 on the batter without awarding the base-on-balls to get the pitch count then potentially have the batter strike out on a coach pitch, but not have those pitches affect the player-pitcher's pitch count. And to make things more complicated, AAA only has the 2 walk limit for half the season.

[FTMSupport]

Thank you for taking the time to create all these suggestions. There are some great suggestions in here, and we will definitely use them to help prioritize future releases. Some we have had on our list of enhancement requests for a while, and some are already done for our next release (1.7), but there are a few that we have not heard before.

Great stuff.

[OhioTex]

Would echo some of the suggestions: (using his original numbering)
1) There is no visual indication of foul balls for the current batter. Once the batter has two strikes, I cannot be sure if I pressed the foul button or not.
• Yes, would be helpful

2) After each half inning, the UI immediately advances to the next half inning. That's nice, but right at the end of the inning, the official score keeper would say something like "that 34 pitches for Johnny, right?" and I'd have to shrug and say "I don't know". I could get it by going to the stats page, but that's a bit of work when I'm already scrambling to figure out which players are where on the field before the umpire calls the first batter up. Maybe a half-inning summary page, or find a

• Perhaps a split screen *(I know v 1.8)* top half recaps inning, bottom half tells next three (or four) batters up (have heard others ask to see ) plus an option button to go to defensive substitution screen ...

1) It's be nice to have H/R/E per inning as opposed to H/R per inning and H/R/E for the game.
• Perhaps on split screen between innings in summary too


2) The way the fielders' positions are encoded on the score sheet, it's ambiguous if they played the same position for multiple innings, or sat on the bench one inning. In this case, one player played 3B for innings 1,2,4,6 and LF for inning 3, and was on the bench inning 5. We'd code that as a string like "5-5-7-5-X-5" on our paper sheets, but is 5,1;7,3;5,4;5,6 on the score sheet. The gaps are ambiguous as to if the player played the same position as the previous inning or was on the bench.
• agree

1) A post game editing feature. I scored a play as a catching error from 1-5 when in fact it was a throwing error from 1-5. So the error was assigned to the wrong player. Maybe in the game play-by-play, you could click through and fine-tune/modify the information after the game?
• All await this in v 1.7+

[Phantom Sage]

I agree with all,

ALSO, some dialogue is needed to let users know that they can still track pitch location on strike 3 before you record an action (strike/fould/ball, etc.) on the next batter. OR after the in-play action, hit location etc. (in this case you need to swipe back to the pitch location screen and record pitch location before pressing some action for the next batter.

To not do so, means you have some holes in the data for the pitcher when you look at the pitch dispersal.

Perhaps it would be better to prompt for pitch location before moving on to the next event if the user is originating from that screen (I am aware that some ignore this feature).

[FTMSupport]

Yeah.. it's a tough call on the pitching data. A lot of users don't use it at all, so we probably don't want any prompting about it. But yes, you can enter pitch location at any time before the next "action", and it applies to the previous pitch (even when a half inning has ended and the next batter is up).

The pitch by pitch view makes this much clearer for the folks that are tracking pitches.

[Phantom Sage]

Not sure if this is doable but, does the programming language know what screen you are on if you originate your screen taps from the pitch location screen?

If so can't you trap or use some kind of conditional statement to only prompt for those that have marked pitch location and ignore the prompt for those that use the balls/stikes/etc. buttons on the field screen?

[FTMSupport]

Yes, we would know what screen you were coming from. When we start allowing users to set their own preferences for scoring (i don't want to see "animations", i don't care about hit location, i do want to record pitch locations, i only want to score for my team, etc), then some of these things will be much easier to include. You would simply set in your options screen that you want to enter pitch location for every pitch, and the app can prompt you to make sure you do.

That is not our highest priority right now, but it is creeping up the list as we do more and more of the more frequent requests... so it will likely be in the product soon.

Thank you.

[deanhoyt]

The one comment I like is the half inning summary.
Some way to designate a change, and possible viewing lineup or position changes, even upcoming batters, pitch count.

I have seen in another app the teams have colors. This would be nice to visually change from red to blue, based on the team color settings. It is just a subtle background color change. Or the batters and runners colors. This also helps in defining a change in half innings.