App: EPL Addicts
by Chris on 14 March 2011
Free football goodness
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Pros
So what’s the crack? EPL Addicts is a neat little application that will quench the thirst of even the biggest Premier League fans by serving up stats, opinions and news from any of the 20 top tier teams.
Of course there are other similar apps out there that will give you live scores or news about your team.
The clever bit with EPL Addicts is they have utilised online blogs, forums, fan sites and social networking sites to find the hidden gems amongst the garbage (also known as the internet)
So after you have selected which team/s to follow you get your main home screen displaying the current teams (scroll right if you have selected more than one) top stories, next match, last match, transfer rumours and injury list.
What brings this app together is the UI which is simple to use and looks clean with a great use of bold type within the navigation menus.
You might be surprised to find out that this app is from a young Swedish development company HelloSwe. The company itself is pretty new, but the 3 main guys behind it have a ton of experience in developing web products for large international companies.
The captain of HelloSwe Patrik Arnesson explains how the the ball began to roll…
“We were very tired of creating good ideas from the beginning but ending up with 1/10 of what we wanted to do because the customer had bad engineers and badly structured digital/marketing
departments.
Together we pitched a football site for a european gambling company. We were pretty confident that they would buy the product which made us start developing the site before we got a decision from the customer.”
There is also an accompanying website that has a more fleshed out and detailed experience which you would normally expect from the mobile app version.
That said this app is great for keeping up with the EPL on the go, and whilst you may think you only want the info for the number one love of your life (West Ham United), i’ve found it great for keeping track of relegation rivals, for those injury rumours which you pray go your way!
Cons
Being recently released on the 28th of Feb 2011 the app is obviously still version 1.0.
And so we thought we would throw up some suggestions for future releases.
*Tiny spelling mistake, in the next match preview section under missing players appear as ‘Injuried’ where I think it should be ‘Injured’. ( I have no idea what the Swedish for injured is so easy mistake)
*I feel the top stories text is way to small my guess is around 8px’s? should never be smaller than 10px, I’d much rather have a tad more scrolling to do and be able to clearly see the headlines. The size used in ‘missing players’ would be a good size to try and match.
*In the line-up section I actually tried to press the other teams name to switch between the two before I spotted the change team button (maybe it’s just me) but I think the people are used to and now expect large non-body text to behave as a button or link, especially as you have a visual aid (white text for selected team, 30-40% opacity for unselected team) if possible I would remove the change team button.
*The last point relies heavily on the development, programming side of things which I have no clue about (so please excuse if this is just not possible).
I think it would be nice if the stories from the blogs could be pulled into the app instead of just linking outwards to the page itself, this obviously breaks the user journey literally in the sense they might not have a sufficient internet connection to open the url and but even if they do it still interrupts the flow of the experience, a.k.a some people can’t wait!
On the whole a great app that any true football fan should pack, o and by the way did we mention it’s completely FREE!
Agree or not? Give us your opinion. Or don't (no-one will make you).