Software Warlock

A new season of baseball is upon us, and while that doesn’t have much relevance to the topic of this blog, the updated Minnesota Twins website does.

The feature of interest is the rotating set of stories/images in the upper left part of the home page. Many news/sports sites have a feature similar to this (Wild, MSN, etc.) but I was impressed with this implementation in how it communicated so much information without intruding on the content.

First, you’ll see the previous/next indicators that are common these days (a great use of positioning is done on Facebook’s photo viewer) along with a simple play/pause button to allow the images to rotate through. The part I like best, however, is in the use of the page indicators. They are nice for a number of reason. First, they are there, so you don’t have to go flipping through the prev/next arrows to find a story that you saw for a moment before; More importantly, though, they are acting as timer indicators so that you know how much time you have before the image switches to the next story. Many times when I’m using these screens something catches my eye but I don’t have time to read the details before it randomly flips to the next page. This can especially be a problem when you try to present a final slide of multiple stories, a la MSN.

Anyway, my only complaint is that it takes up a tad too much space vertically and the orange color of the timing indicators can distract from the image. A slightly smaller version that went from solid white with a gray or black pie-piece indicator might work better.