Scoreboard Usability

Allow me to introduce myself. I am Mike and I have been working on the Scoreboard at Emirates Old Trafford cricket ground for 20 years now. When I started, the scoreboard was an old-fashioned wooden scoreboard that was run a series of ladders, washing lines, ropes, levers, hooks and metal plates.


In 2009, the old scoreboard was replaced with an electronic screen. As a code-monkey, a web developer who had an interest in usability and someone with enough graphics design knowledge to be dangerous, I was in my element


The inspiration for this comes from hearing talk of the ECB’s new 100 ball competition and the need to simplify cricket scoreboards. My answer to that is that scoreboards do not need to be simplified per se, but just designed better.


In this hugely self-indulgent blog, I’m going to give you 9 tenets which we have tried to follow when using designing and setting up our scoreboard over the years. I’ve leant heavily on Jakob Nielsen and his usability guidelines and I’ll mostly talk about how they apply to stats heavy games like cricket and their scoreboard but having been thinking about this and looking at scoreboards on TV and from other sports, these apply equally across all of them.