Everyone Loves Brackets
Why we created Brackify
March Madness has always been an event at every company I've worked at while in the states. As an Australian I was unfamiliar with how important this event was to my American colleagues. Not one to turn down a challenge to win a bunch of money, I would eagerly throw in the pre-requisite fee to enter the office pool each year. Filling out my bracket with very limited knowledge of the NCAA and basketball in general, I would wait in anticipation for the news of my great victory. I would of course never win.
Also around this time of year I would see a bunch of sites creating their own brackets with site specific content completely unrelated to basketball. These tournaments were great because now I could participate in brackets that had content I could relate to. Two good examples:
- Jalopnik: March Madness Beat-Off: Round 2
- Apartment Therapy: Pet Madness Day 5: Sweet Sixteen Begins
One of the positive effects we immediately noticed is there’s always a high amount of user activity on posts that feature a bracket, tournament or any kind of voting really. The comments would be plentiful and filled with people sharing their picks. In some cases, we would also notice an increase in sharing the posts to social networks. You just have to compare a recent post that doesn’t feature any kind of voting with one that does and by looking at the number of shares, you’ll see a difference. Take a look at our example on BostonInno. In about a week it’s already been shared over 2,500 times.
The fact that voting in a poll or a tournament is one of the most simple, anonymous actions a user can take to participate in online discussion without having to login or comment, makes brackets very attractive to the majority of site audiences that prefer to participate without commenting or logging in.
As part of our research for the product, we sought out as many brackets as we could on large sites and one consistent thing we noticed was that every implementation was different. Essentially content creators were hacking together brackets using any tools and means available. It was rare to find a site with a fully fleshed out bracket built in-house that worked seamlessly on desktop and mobile devices.
One of the most popular types of hacked together brackets was the Jalopnik example. You have a giant image that is the representation of the bracket. The bracket contains 64 cars and is pretty much unviewable unless you open the image directly in its own window.
Then you also have editorial staff breaking down each match up into separate PollDaddy polls.
This image and poll example is one we saw quite often… Here’s how we thought the process of creating and updating an image and embedded poll bracket went down.
- The editor asks the designer to create a bracket image containing the items they want to feature in the bracket
- The designer then proceeds to come up with a fantastic looking bracket with editorial input (I’m sure there are a few revisions)
- While the bracket is being completed, the editor goes and visits an engineer to see what technology they should use?
- The engineer tells the editor that voting and brackets are on the product roadmap and won't be available for another 6 months.
- The engineer suggests using an existing solution like PollDaddy for each of the match ups and exporting the results as a CSV file after each round and emailing those results to the designer so they could update the graphic
- The editor creates the Poll Daddy polls for the first round match ups and embeds them in the first post
As the contest progresses the editor will have to go back to the designer and update the bracket graphic with the winners of each round. Not to mention reupload the file each time there is a new round. The editor then has to create new polls for each of the new match ups in subsequent rounds. Hardly an efficient process.
We can do this better
The team that created Brackify has worked with editorial teams in some way shape or form for the last 10 years. We understand how much of a time suck creating a tournament can be. Bracket images get too big, require multiple design revisions and polls nearly always embed weirdly depending on the content management system the editorial team was using.
Brackify sets out to streamline this process. With a very simple administration tool, editors can create a 16 or 32 size bracket. They can then make a determination on whether or not users complete the entire bracket or take the round by round approach. It was important for us to offer these two types of brackets to allow editors to determine what kind of bracket best suits their content and editorial strategy.
Once an editor sets up the bracket they can then create the match ups and upload the associated image, video, animated gifs for each choice (users can upload more the one piece of media per item). The final step is grab the embed code and drop the bracket into content, or direct link to the bracket itself.
Honestly though, the best way to experience Brackify is to try one out for yourself. Because everybody loves puppies, we created a Puppy Tournament.
Photo by aliennation
If you’re interested in finding out more about Brackify, check out the official site, http://brackify.com
If you haven’t done so already Be sure to check out the puppies bracket if only for the cute photos.
