I received an email yesterday from a gentleman named Eduardo Casais asking me to take a look his company’s mobile World Cup site. The company is called Areppim AG and appears to be a web design firm in Bern, Switzerland. I’m rather impressed by the site and wanted to get this post up before tomorrow’s Germany – Italy match. Areppim has come up with an unusual and interesting concept and an excellent mobile site from the standpoint of usability and compatibility with a wide range of devices.

The site, WC’06 is a World Cup statistics site with a unique twist. Statistics are presented on WC’06 primarily in the form of graphs. For each team in the tournament there are graphs of various statistics such as goals per match, relative time of ball possession, shots per match and number of red and yellow cards. There is a comparison feature (top image) that lets you can lay the graphs of any two teams on top of each other – useful for making predictions and for bettors I would think. The coverage of matches (bottom image) is unusual too. They are presented as a time-line with various colored symbols on the line showing where each goal, card or substitution occurred. I don’t know if the match time-lines are updated in real time but am hoping that they are.

The site worked well on all the emulators and devices I have at my disposal. Areppim is doing a great job of resizing images to match browser resolutions. The pages are small, under 5 KB including images so they load fast and aren’t going to hit any browser limits. WC’06’s user interface is well thought out too. The charts are grouped under categories like “performance”, “strength” and “evaluations”. You enter a category and choose a team or teams. Selecting a next link cycles through the various charts in each category. Selecting exit at any point takes you back to the team selection level and pressing exit again takes you back up to the category selection page. I found the navigation very easy to use. I wish my Motorola phone’s menus were as consistent and intuitive. I also found WC’06 fun and addictive to play with.

I know less than nothing about football but a few minutes of playing with WC’06’s comparison graphs leads me to predict a Germany – Portugal final. We’ll see about that!

WC’06: cHtml
Content:  Usability: