Tuesday, September 4, 2007

ESPN hits a home run with new timeout indicator

While watching the Appalachian State upset over Michigan the other day, I found myself asking many times over the last 2 minutes, "How many timeouts are there left?" If you're a football fan, you've undoubtedly asked the same question over the years. During this game, I had to wait until they displayed a graphic or Thom Brenneman said how many timeouts either team had. It was frustrating, I don't like to wait.

Last night, I'm watching the Florida State-Clemson game on ESPN (Clemson won). At several points throughout the game, I wondered how many timeouts each team had. This time, my questions were answered immediately by ESPN's new graphic, which has yellow dashes for each timeout the teams have right underneath their names. The information I needed was displayed at all teams, right up with the score, but was done in such a manner where it did not distract my attention from the actual game and took up very little space of the screen. Job well done, ESPN.

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