Not all mobile apps are great to use

I've played ESPN fantasy sports for many years. ESPN also creates one of my favorite mobile apps, their ScoreCenter app (though it could be sooo much better.) However their fantasy baseball app is one of the most frustrating apps out there. It provides access to your fantasy baseball teams. The other way to access your teams is through the website. The website is what sets your expectation of course. When you login to the website, you are first presented with a list of your teams. Once you choose a team, you are shown your team's stats for the day:

This not only sets one's expectations for interacting with your fantasy baseball team, but it really is quite useful. You want to see how your team is doing today when you login. We should expect something similar from the corresponding mobile app. Instead you get this:

This is from the Android app, but the iPhone one is almost identical (which is also a sad state of things.) You start off with having to pick your team. However when you pick your team, you are presented with the season stats for all of your players. That's not what you want. To get how your team did today, you have to open  up this crazy selector, then change the option whose default value is "Season" (we only the value, not the name of what this property is) to "Day." This brings us back to the crazy selector, where you select Done and then you get today's stats for your team.

What's even worse is that this is the 2011 version of the app. There was a (different) app for 2010. To get the 2011 one, you had to buy it. The 2010 app had the same frustrating UI. Last year at WWDC I talked about this to the developer of the iPhone app (which is exactly as bad as the Android one.) I told them about how this sucks. So not only did the 2010 app not get fixed, but they didn't fix it for the 2011 app which was a "new" app that required one to

(More?) ESPN Fantasy Baseball Problems

My ESPN fantasy baseball teams have been doing very well this year. I always check them in the mornings. This morning I noticed something odd with the statistics and standings. Here's a picture of the standings sorted by WHIP:



Quick note if you're not familiar with the WHIP statistic in baseball. It stands for Walks + Hits per Inning Pitched. It's basically how many base runners a pitcher allows each inning on average. Thus a lower value is better.

So you'd expect the team with the lowest WHIP (VENEZUELA ANATOMY with a 1.143) to be at the top of the list when teams are sorted by WHIP. Having the best WHIP, they should also get 10 points contributed to the point totals used for overall standings. Instead, VENEZUELA is in third place and the team with the fourth best WHIP is in first.

Do we have another case of ESPN having problems? Well, sort of. You might have noticed that I was using the Windows Safari browser. There have been a lot of bugs with WinSafari. So it was only prudent for me to load the same page in Firefox:


Now everything looks exactly as it should! Notice that not only have the display orders changed, but the point totals as well. You might notice the my team (Campbell HGH in bold) even has two more points in Firefox than in Safari (89 vs. 87.) I tried the same page in IE7 and Opera, and it displayed correctly (just like Firefox) in both of those as well. I'll give it a try on MacSafari later, too.

So how could using Safari cause such a bizarre "bug" with Safari? Well doing a view source on the ESPN page revealed a lot. Here's a snippet:

This Sortable JavaScript class is the key. It looks like ESPN just passes in the raw data (each team plus it's cumulative statis in each category) to this JavaScript class and then uses JavaScript to do not only the sorting, but also the point calculations (since it is based on the sorting) and overall rankings.

It seems like a reasonable way to render such a page. All sorting and calculations are done client-side. JavaScript is certainly more than capable of handling such tasks. Well, at least it should be. These screen shots suggest that there is a bug with Safari's JavaScript. It would seem like a fairly severe bug, too, since it seems to be related to how it is comparing floating point values. That's just a guess. It could be a lot more subtle than that.

ESPN Fantasy Baseball Reset

In the aftermath of the problems at ESPN fantasy baseball, they've decided to reset the whole game! I guess it makes sense. I had some great pickups one one of my two teams -- the team that wasn't affected by any of the problems. Maybe other teams in that league were, but I don't think so. It seemed like any problems were on a league-wide basis. My second team had problems, and there were definitely extra messages from ESPN posted to that league that weren't posted to the other league. Oh well, it's not like we're paying any of this. ESPN has offered reasonable compensation to make up for everything, including giving ESPN Insider access for the duration of the baseball season. That's pretty nice. I don't know how many times I would get an RSS post from ESPN that was insider-only, and I wouldn't know it was insider-only until I had clicked on the link back to ESPN's site.

Fantasy Baseball: ESPN vs. Yahoo!

I've played fantasy sports for more than ten years now. A lot of that has been on ESPN. I've spent a lot of money of fantasy teams. Two years ago I started playing a little on Yahoo Sports as well. Their service is free, but it was clearly not as good as ESPN's.

What's interesting though is that this year there seemed to be some pretty fierce competition between ESPN and Yahoo. ESPN started making their fantasy baseball free for the firs time. They reduced the features and eliminated prizes. They kept around more complicated leagues with prizes, but of course they had a price.

Yahoo continued to expand their features. They how had live scoring, something you had to pay for in the past (and something ESPN has had for several years.) They've also added more bling to their interface, with drag-and-drop rosters.

But now something kind of funny has happened. Well at least it's funny to a programmer like me it's funny. ESPN clearly was unprepared for the popularity brought on by making fantasy baseball free. They had simplified the free version of things, but kept most of the features from the $20-30 version. They've had so many problems. On the first day of the season, there were frozen rosters, wrong scores, broken waivers. They've sent out some emails apologizing for the many problems:

To all of our ESPN Fantasy Baseball players,

We wanted to be sure you had the latest update on what is happening with ESPN Fantasy Baseball, and what we're in the midst of doing to get things back on track for you.

We have every resource, including our full technical team as well as additional specialized technical and quality assurance personnel, working to resolve these issues.

Based on extensive ongoing work and testing, we expect to have the problems affecting Fantasy Baseball resolved by Wednesday. It is possible that between now and then testing could reveal complications that would push the resolution to later in the week. However, we are confident in targeting Wednesday and are taking every step during that time to ensure that the solutions we provide for you will be complete and long-lasting.

While it may sound simple, the core problem lies in issues with transaction information being processed incorrectly and at incorrect times - which presents complexities as data progressively compounds.

Here's the latest on what is being done:

We have made significant progress finding and working towards a fix for the core problems responsible for roster irregularities and incorrect waiver, free agent and other transactions. Due to the nature of software, thorough testing must be performed to ensure that the solutions we implement will fully resolve the issues and preserve the long-term integrity of the game. To do that, we have created parallels of ESPN Fantasy Baseball leagues in a development and quality assurance environment -- simulating the live game activity. In this environment we have been, and continue to run extensive testing of potential fixes for the core problems. There are approximately 70 different variations of our game currently in use, and we are simulating all of these. In parallel, we have programmers and technicians troubleshooting problems that have created scoring and standings irregularities - isolating and testing potential solutions.

Please know -- it is not just rhetoric when we say we continue to work non-stop to resolve this. We owe you the fastest, most effective and stable solution - and that is our sole focus.

We will continue to communicate with you as there are further developments, and you will hear from us again no later than Wednesday at 3 p.m. ET.

We apologize again for the frustration you've experienced and appreciate your continued patience.

You are our number one priority.

John Kosner, senior vice president and general manager, ESPN.com and the entire ESPN.com Fantasy team

Ouch! I like how they've now created "parallels of ESPN Fantasy Baseball leagues in a development and quality assurance environment" and "There are approximately 70 different variations of our game currently in use." Sounds like there are configurations that they didn't test -- at all. They didn't have unit tests for it or functional tests by QA. They've resorted to cloning live data to do their testing against. That's really not good!

I had thought that simply weren't prepared for the scale, but it sounds like their problems are deeper. Talk about an embarrassing situation for their engineering group.

Oh, and for what's it's worth -- I have two ESPN teams, and one Yahoo team. They're all doing crummy so far. My hitting has stunk, though my pitching has been very good. I'm not worrying though. I figure my guys will start hitting. Hopefully ESPN will have their problems worked out by then.