How to tell if your tournament is getting too complicated

Tournaments

I was going through my bills today. As usual, I threw away more marketing stuffed-in crap than the actual invoice. As I was tossing the Verizon Wireless stuff, an insert caught my eye. It was titled A guide to understanding your bill. It was printed in 4-color, double-sided, 8.5×14 on glossy paper. Somebody put a lot of work into this instructional piece. A quick snap-shot of one of the sections is posted to the left of this article.¬†

I started reading it and the more I read, the less I understood about my cell phone bill. Yes, everything was there and there were these neat little red arrows pointing to the various pieces I should probably understand, but it was confusing. Here is what I know about my relationship with Verizon Wireless:

  • I have a cell phone that will allow me to make and receive calls.
  • For the service above, I expect to get a bill in the neighborhood of what I agreed to pay when I signed the contract, give or take a few dollars for 411 calls or extra text messages, etc.
  • On my bill, I want to know what I owe and when/where to pay.

That’s is. Understanding my bill does not make me a more loyal customer. In fact, making it so difficult to¬†understand¬†my bill that I need a detailed guide to understanding my bill makes me think that Verizon Wireless is trying to hide stuff from me in my bill and makes me even more nervous about doing business with them. (Your experience may vary.)

Our advice: When you have created systems like applications, standings tie-breakers, registration forms, etc. that are so complicated that you need to publish guides just to ensure that teams understand what to do and/or how to read them or complete the forms, your tournament is way too complicated. Every form, every system should be immediately intuitive.

At TourneyCentral, we start and finish each feature on our sites by asking¬†ourselves¬†one critical question, Can my 67-year-old mother complete this task without help? If the answer is yes, we’ve done our job well. If the answer is no, we stay at the drawing board until we get a yes.