Scoring for the World Cup

Recently i got to work on a great brief for the BBC, building their interactive World Cup wall-chart, which was coupled with a predictor so you could decide for yourself who deserved to win, and not worry about the actual football.

Here is the link: BBC World Cup: Team Tracker 

You can view match highlights and share links to main BBC site content, as well as sharing your predictions with friends via the usual Facebook and Twitter links.

The work was really challenging: technically tricky, lots of design input, and not really enough time.

Geekily, one of my favourite bits was finding a way to make a compressed encoding of the prediction (which had to have two team names for every match in the tournament, together with who you thought won and lost each match), which i got down to two characters per match. Really geeky, but it was a major issue and an elegant solution using base 32 characters.

There has been some chatter about the work, some liking the design, but mostly just ordinary people using it to share their predictions, which is at least one brilliant result from the competition...