2026-07-13, 11:18 PM - Word count:
Preface
I started this article to help improve the SSL portal. I want to first acknowledge that building a portal from the ground up is not easy. It takes a lot of time, effort, and knowledge to be able to create something. It is a lot easier to critique. I also want to acknowledge that the portal does a lot well. However, in this article, I will not necessarily call out everything it does well so it may appear like all I have is criticism.
Note that this is all from the perspective of a relatively new sim league user that is currently part of SSL and ISFL. This started off as an information re-architecture proposal. However, it has slowly morphed into some UX related feedback and suggestions.
New Proposed Structure
Home
├── Player
│ └── Bank / Store
├── Organizations
├── Standings
├── Schedule
├── Stats
│ ├── Season
│ ├── Career
│ └── Records
├── Forum
├── Social
│ ├── YouTube
│ ├── Discord
│ ├── Stickers?
│ └── Wiki?
└── Resources
├── Player Search
├── Budget
├── Calendar
├── Draft Class Tracker
├── Position Tracker
└── WSFC Regions
Key Changes & Rationale
Upleveling Key Pages
To get to the Organizations page in the current portal, a user must navigate to the Trackers menu, then navigate to the Organizations link, and click. This is 3 steps. There is enough real estate on the top navigation to bring up some commonly used pages so that users do not have to traverse drop down menus. With my proposed change, the new process would be: navigate to Organizations link and click, 2 steps.
I’ve identified a number of what I believe are key pages that should be brought up to the main navigation. A case could be made for a couple other pages like player search.
In the current site, the top level drop down items (ex: Trackers and Index) are not links. In my proposal some of these should be links. Player and Stats should be links. The Stats menu should be clickable and take you to the season’s stats page.
Reduce number of drop down menus and replace with tabs
This is related to the previous change. Currently, drop down menus are often used to slice between different leagues. A couple examples of where this is currently used: Index, standings, and schedule. There are more steps required to change leagues via drop down than if a tab was used. Less steps are better, especially if I am changing frequently.
What is an Index?
You may notice that my proposed structure does not have anything called an index. When I first started in sim league, I had no idea what an index was. It didn’t take me long to figure it out, but this taxonomy is unfamiliar to new users. Where possible, we should use what they are familiar with to make the transition as easy as possible.
Since the data for the index is already in the portal, we don’t have to call it an index and we can keep the same overall experience. Contrast this with the ISFL where the index is an export from the engine, the experience is outside of the portal and it is an index and is referred to as such. In this proposal it’s just called stats. Everyone knows stats.
Incorporation of Academy content into existing pages
Being just barely removed from academy play, this wound is fresh. The academy content is treated as an ugly step child. It really shouldn’t be. This is how your new users are interacting with your portal. They should have as good of an experience as you can give them to encourage them to stay.
One scenario in particular I think highlights this really well. If an academy user wants to find out who his academy teammates are. They probably go to the Organizations page and clicks on Academy or they navigate to Academy from their player page. Unfortunately, this just takes you to all the players that are part of the academy this season. This is the same information that you get from the draft class tracker and not really what they were looking for. The actual correct path is to go to the Academy Index and start typing your academy team name into the search field so that it starts to filter on those players. The scenario is even worse if you don’t know what your team’s name is because now you are searching for your player’s name. The next clue you get is the icon next to your player’s name. However, there is nothing on the portal that tells you what team that icon next to your name represents. In the context of organizations, my proposal is to have a section for academy teams where players can see all the players on all the different academy teams. There is no guessing what each team is called or what the icons represent. Yes this could be solved by a user being on Discord, but it shouldn’t be required – the portal should be able to stand alone.
While the other sections are not nearly as bad – the stats, standings, and schedule should all be part of their main counterparts. There should just be a tab for academy content in those sections. This keeps all that relevant content in the same space. I shouldn’t need to go to a whole separate area because that is where academy stuff lives. This way it is consistent with how minors and cup are also treated. As in I should be able to easily jump between majors, minors, and academy views for all the primary domains (stats, standings, and schedule).
Include secondary information (and links)
Overall, this is actually fairly well done already but I believe it is still important enough to call out. I recognize that adding all the secondary information may feel redundant. However, often when you are at a certain page, you want a good view of the relevant information for that page. That secondary information needs to be there for a user to get a better picture/perspective. I’ll offer an example where this can be improved.
An organization’s page. Some relevant information that could be included are:
• Their current spot in the standings (with link to full standings)
• Their player stats (with link to all player stats)
• Their recent results and upcoming matches (with link to full schedule)
• Team stats/ranks
• Team history (records and awards)
When all this information is available and quickly accessible from an organization’s page, a user will get a better view of that organization. This is a net new perspective as there are no organization specific views. Currently, everything is grouped together (all the results are together, all the stats are together, etc). There may be users that don’t care about other teams, this helps them cut away the noise of the other teams and focus on what they truly care about in one space.
Other Changes / Suggestions / Comments
I won't necessarily go into too detail on all of these other proposed changes but I did want to mention them in some capacity.
Improve Portal Performance and Load Times - This is one of the slowest loading websites that I go to. I am not sure why that is, but I think it is something that should be looked into. I often load it in a background tab meaning to do something league related but since it is in a background tab when I get back to it I forget what I was intending to do there.
Results Arrow instead of Horizontal Scroll - I am old, but trying to find a tiny scroll bar or arrow is not as easy as it used to be. Move to large arrows/panels on each side - commonly seen in gallery UX. These are larger targets making it easier to use.
Schedule and/or YouTube Integration - This is more of a nice to have suggestion. It would be really cool to have some indicator/countdown for when the next match day is in your timezone and a link to the YouTube stream for that match day.
SSL Portal Button should not go to the forums - There is an SSL Portal button on the top left. It is weird to me that this goes to the forums and not the portal home page. I recognize that there is already a Home button. But the location of the SSL Portal afaik is not the forums. That is misleading/confusing.
Add History - This is something I really like from ISFL. There is a history section that includes GM(OM/AM) History, draft history, awards, etc. I think it is a cool way to share/publish league history that is better than a forum post. My preference for this would actually be a league Wiki and have that be the source of truth.
Add Team Stats - These stats from what I can tell are captured each match day, but it would be nice to see them in a table at a team level. Which team has the highest xG, etc?
Add Data Export - I understand there is an API and that is great. For those less technically inclined it would be great to get a export feature. This exists in the ISFL portal for most of what you want and this really lowers the barrier of writing stat based articles which is good for the league.
Notes
I actually had more planned for this article (going through more user scenarios, a deeper dive into the current information architecture, more detailed explanation of my proposal with mock ups, etc) but I ran out of time (wanted to get this out sooner than later) and got caught up in other stuff (Summer/ISFL scouting/draft).
Hopefully this was useful. Feel free to ask any questions and I'll try to get to them.
I started this article to help improve the SSL portal. I want to first acknowledge that building a portal from the ground up is not easy. It takes a lot of time, effort, and knowledge to be able to create something. It is a lot easier to critique. I also want to acknowledge that the portal does a lot well. However, in this article, I will not necessarily call out everything it does well so it may appear like all I have is criticism.
Note that this is all from the perspective of a relatively new sim league user that is currently part of SSL and ISFL. This started off as an information re-architecture proposal. However, it has slowly morphed into some UX related feedback and suggestions.
New Proposed Structure
Home
├── Player
│ └── Bank / Store
├── Organizations
├── Standings
├── Schedule
├── Stats
│ ├── Season
│ ├── Career
│ └── Records
├── Forum
├── Social
│ ├── YouTube
│ ├── Discord
│ ├── Stickers?
│ └── Wiki?
└── Resources
├── Player Search
├── Budget
├── Calendar
├── Draft Class Tracker
├── Position Tracker
└── WSFC Regions
Key Changes & Rationale
Upleveling Key Pages
To get to the Organizations page in the current portal, a user must navigate to the Trackers menu, then navigate to the Organizations link, and click. This is 3 steps. There is enough real estate on the top navigation to bring up some commonly used pages so that users do not have to traverse drop down menus. With my proposed change, the new process would be: navigate to Organizations link and click, 2 steps.
I’ve identified a number of what I believe are key pages that should be brought up to the main navigation. A case could be made for a couple other pages like player search.
In the current site, the top level drop down items (ex: Trackers and Index) are not links. In my proposal some of these should be links. Player and Stats should be links. The Stats menu should be clickable and take you to the season’s stats page.
Reduce number of drop down menus and replace with tabs
This is related to the previous change. Currently, drop down menus are often used to slice between different leagues. A couple examples of where this is currently used: Index, standings, and schedule. There are more steps required to change leagues via drop down than if a tab was used. Less steps are better, especially if I am changing frequently.
What is an Index?
You may notice that my proposed structure does not have anything called an index. When I first started in sim league, I had no idea what an index was. It didn’t take me long to figure it out, but this taxonomy is unfamiliar to new users. Where possible, we should use what they are familiar with to make the transition as easy as possible.
Since the data for the index is already in the portal, we don’t have to call it an index and we can keep the same overall experience. Contrast this with the ISFL where the index is an export from the engine, the experience is outside of the portal and it is an index and is referred to as such. In this proposal it’s just called stats. Everyone knows stats.
Incorporation of Academy content into existing pages
Being just barely removed from academy play, this wound is fresh. The academy content is treated as an ugly step child. It really shouldn’t be. This is how your new users are interacting with your portal. They should have as good of an experience as you can give them to encourage them to stay.
One scenario in particular I think highlights this really well. If an academy user wants to find out who his academy teammates are. They probably go to the Organizations page and clicks on Academy or they navigate to Academy from their player page. Unfortunately, this just takes you to all the players that are part of the academy this season. This is the same information that you get from the draft class tracker and not really what they were looking for. The actual correct path is to go to the Academy Index and start typing your academy team name into the search field so that it starts to filter on those players. The scenario is even worse if you don’t know what your team’s name is because now you are searching for your player’s name. The next clue you get is the icon next to your player’s name. However, there is nothing on the portal that tells you what team that icon next to your name represents. In the context of organizations, my proposal is to have a section for academy teams where players can see all the players on all the different academy teams. There is no guessing what each team is called or what the icons represent. Yes this could be solved by a user being on Discord, but it shouldn’t be required – the portal should be able to stand alone.
While the other sections are not nearly as bad – the stats, standings, and schedule should all be part of their main counterparts. There should just be a tab for academy content in those sections. This keeps all that relevant content in the same space. I shouldn’t need to go to a whole separate area because that is where academy stuff lives. This way it is consistent with how minors and cup are also treated. As in I should be able to easily jump between majors, minors, and academy views for all the primary domains (stats, standings, and schedule).
Include secondary information (and links)
Overall, this is actually fairly well done already but I believe it is still important enough to call out. I recognize that adding all the secondary information may feel redundant. However, often when you are at a certain page, you want a good view of the relevant information for that page. That secondary information needs to be there for a user to get a better picture/perspective. I’ll offer an example where this can be improved.
An organization’s page. Some relevant information that could be included are:
• Their current spot in the standings (with link to full standings)
• Their player stats (with link to all player stats)
• Their recent results and upcoming matches (with link to full schedule)
• Team stats/ranks
• Team history (records and awards)
When all this information is available and quickly accessible from an organization’s page, a user will get a better view of that organization. This is a net new perspective as there are no organization specific views. Currently, everything is grouped together (all the results are together, all the stats are together, etc). There may be users that don’t care about other teams, this helps them cut away the noise of the other teams and focus on what they truly care about in one space.
Other Changes / Suggestions / Comments
I won't necessarily go into too detail on all of these other proposed changes but I did want to mention them in some capacity.
Improve Portal Performance and Load Times - This is one of the slowest loading websites that I go to. I am not sure why that is, but I think it is something that should be looked into. I often load it in a background tab meaning to do something league related but since it is in a background tab when I get back to it I forget what I was intending to do there.
Results Arrow instead of Horizontal Scroll - I am old, but trying to find a tiny scroll bar or arrow is not as easy as it used to be. Move to large arrows/panels on each side - commonly seen in gallery UX. These are larger targets making it easier to use.
Schedule and/or YouTube Integration - This is more of a nice to have suggestion. It would be really cool to have some indicator/countdown for when the next match day is in your timezone and a link to the YouTube stream for that match day.
SSL Portal Button should not go to the forums - There is an SSL Portal button on the top left. It is weird to me that this goes to the forums and not the portal home page. I recognize that there is already a Home button. But the location of the SSL Portal afaik is not the forums. That is misleading/confusing.
Add History - This is something I really like from ISFL. There is a history section that includes GM(OM/AM) History, draft history, awards, etc. I think it is a cool way to share/publish league history that is better than a forum post. My preference for this would actually be a league Wiki and have that be the source of truth.
Add Team Stats - These stats from what I can tell are captured each match day, but it would be nice to see them in a table at a team level. Which team has the highest xG, etc?
Add Data Export - I understand there is an API and that is great. For those less technically inclined it would be great to get a export feature. This exists in the ISFL portal for most of what you want and this really lowers the barrier of writing stat based articles which is good for the league.
Notes
I actually had more planned for this article (going through more user scenarios, a deeper dive into the current information architecture, more detailed explanation of my proposal with mock ups, etc) but I ran out of time (wanted to get this out sooner than later) and got caught up in other stuff (Summer/ISFL scouting/draft).
Hopefully this was useful. Feel free to ask any questions and I'll try to get to them.
