What doesn’t need to be on?

With a wealth of statistics and information that can be put on a scoreboard, it can be a difficult decision on what to leave off, especially for replay screens where space is at a premium.  Older scoreboards that couldn’t alter their layout often suffered from containing too much information.  The example below shows a large proportion of the scoreboard that is not used regularly and often contains un-needed or out of date information.  When thinking about what isn’t needed, I tend to ask three questions

What is implied?

A good example of this, for an in-ground scoreboard, would be indicating which teams are playing.  It can be assumed that if someone is attending the match within the stadium, they should know who is playing.  I would argue that with some knowledge of the fixture and the teams they are watching, their uniform colours and the players on each team they should be able to understand who is doing what.  However, this would not work for a television viewer who has stumbled upon the game whilst channel surfing.

What can be calculated?

When information can be calculated from two pieces of information that is already shown on the scoreboard, does the third figure which is calculated from the first two need to be displayed?

Unless it is integral to the game there is little need to show information that can be calculated.  For example, it is important to show something like “Runs to win” when both the first innings score and the current score is shown, but it is less important to show strike rate when the batters runs and balls faced ae shown

What can be shown at down times or in rotation?

What comes under this question is often includes historic information, rather than about what is happening now.  When a game is ninety percent complete, is there anything to be added by telling the people watching what happened at the very beginning of the game?

This is the sort of information can be useful though, especially to the supremely geeky.

One way to make sure that it is displayed is to show it during some downtime in the action.  If a game has a natural break in it then this would be the ideal time to display the information.  A good example of this would be to show the entire scorecard from an innings at the break between play in a cricket match.

Another way of getting around this and displaying interesting but not important information is to rotate statistics around.  Bearing in mind what was discussed in the first section about key information needing to be displayed all the time, some areas of a scoreboard can show different statistics depending on the game position.  This is discussed more later on.