MTGO in-client schedule needs a revamp

kanister

Member
The way premier events are displayed on MTGOs main page when you log in is extremely inconvenient. I literally use https://mtgoupdate.com/ to know when preliminaries and other scheduled events happen. My suggestions are to:

- display events in the order they happen in - with the closest events on top of the list, instead of sorting them by event type first

- display not only the amount of time left until the event but also its starting date and time. It is really inconvenient to have to do the math every time you see an event starting in two days 21 hours and 46 minutes.

- give some visual cues that indicate the format of the event. Coloring every format differently would make it much easier to know if there are any events that interest you at a glance. Formats already have colors associated with them in the "CONSTRUCTED" tab in the client, so you could just use those.

-the premier event boxes listed on the main page currently look very nice, but there are tons of events and only a few of those boxes fit onto the screen at a time. That makes it inconvenient to scroll through them. They could be smaller for clarity.

In general, the previous version of Magic Online's visual design and user interface did a lot of things right, from the user's perspective.

Please take my feedback into consideration. I'm a serious streamer. :)
 

MTGO_TonyM

Developer
The way premier events are displayed on MTGOs main page when you log in is extremely inconvenient. I literally use https://mtgoupdate.com/ to know when preliminaries and other scheduled events happen. My suggestions are to:

- display events in the order they happen in - with the closest events on top of the list, instead of sorting them by event type first

- display not only the amount of time left until the event but also its starting date and time. It is really inconvenient to have to do the math every time you see an event starting in two days 21 hours and 46 minutes.

- give some visual cues that indicate the format of the event. Coloring every format differently would make it much easier to know if there are any events that interest you at a glance. Formats already have colors associated with them in the "CONSTRUCTED" tab in the client, so you could just use those.

-the premier event boxes listed on the main page currently look very nice, but there are tons of events and only a few of those boxes fit onto the screen at a time. That makes it inconvenient to scroll through them. They could be smaller for clarity.

In general, the previous version of Magic Online's visual design and user interface did a lot of things right, from the user's perspective.

Please take my feedback into consideration. I'm a serious streamer. :)
Thanks for your feedback! I can address some of these and I have some follow-up questions (and other folks please provide your opinions).

Display not only the amount of time left until the event but also its starting date and time. Good news here - this will be taking effect starting with ONE!

Display events in the order they happen & Visual cues for format: Where do you look for these events - right on the Home scene or after clicking Constructed/Limited at the top?
  • If it's Constructed/Limited - we feel spotlighting the highest-profile events in a given format are most important. (There is an argument that Leagues are more important than Prelims based on attendance). Colors of formats help, particularly on the Constructed side.
    • We believe the path most players take to find events is by selecting the format first - curious if folks disagree with that.
  • If it's the Home screen - we had the Premier Events in chronological order until a recent change that was meant more for the Featured Events on that screen. The hard part is the priority value that sets how high it appears on the list spans across multiple screen.
Boxes could be smaller - We hear you here - though, in doing the work for showing starting date/time, we ran out of space to add day of the week. This makes me think that shrinking the boxes may be a bridge too far given the current design.

The overall feedback of "make the schedule easier to parse" is heard loud and clear - we'll work on that.
 

kanister

Member
Thank you for responding!

My feedback was mostly concerned with the "Home" page and the way events are displayed here. In the "Constructed" tab it's pretty easy to find the events you are looking for, as there are usually few enough events to not get lost. Sometimes you want to just know if there are any events that interest you happening soon, so having the event boxes color coded on the "Home" page could help with that.

As for my feedback on the boxes, I'm thinking of Magic Online before its last graphic overhaul a few years ago - like in the screenshot. I know having the upcoming events be just displayed as text might not necessarily look great, but it's very convenient that so many events fit on the screen at a time, instead of just 20 event boxes (frequently out of 20+). Perhaps some middle ground can be found.

gideon-home.png


The crux of the issue is, in my view, how if a user just logs into Magic Online and wonders what events are there to play soon, it's not actually all that easy and convenient right now!
 
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