Cricket is India’s national sport. Indians are absolutely cricket mad. The best players and captains of the national team are A-list celebrities, and some of the highest paid people in the country. This is why The Crock is so vital. For the hundreds of millions of people without access to TVs or advanced smartphones with online videos, finding timely results of the cricket can be a serious problem. Why is this a problem, you might ask? A sense of Belonging is one of the most important parts of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. Without access to cricket scores, marginalized people miss out on being involved with the passion of a nation. The Crock solves this, providing all the important statistics and results with a minimum of data usage and smartphone technology required, allowing everyone in India to be able to connect with their national heroes.
This is the home page. It shows the result of the latest games in the various formats of cricket. It is simple and fast and shows a great overview of the past few games, so it’s easy to get caught up without even having to go beyond this screen. It is accessible for illiterate or semi-literate as well, using recognizable symbols to represent the teams, and having the winning team listed in the left hand column means that even people who are totally illiterate could understand the results if they were introduced to the app by someone who knew the left hand team was the winner.
Clicking on any of the arrows will take you to the more detailed match statistics, and the preferences button takes you to the page seen below:
What’s Your Team? allows users to select the Indian Premier League (IPL) team that will be displayed on the front page of the app. This makes keeping up with your favorite team extremely easy, allowing for maximum engagement from fans.
How About Stats? Allows you to select what Stats pages are available on your app. You might select this based on data availability or the technology that your smartphone has, but this option allows the app to be tailored specifically to each user. The following page is the basic stats, and the page after that is the advanced stats.
This is the basic stats, showing the best batsman from both innings, and the best bowler, as well as the scores and the result. It’s all you need to be caught up with the game and see if your favorite player performed well. If your phone is a bit more advanced and you’d like more info, then you can click More Details, or select Advanced Stats in the preferences page.
This is the advanced statistics page. it shows you the top 3 batsmen and bowlers from both innings, as well as information about the overall score in the series, and importantly, a graph depicting the scoring and fall of wickets. This could potentially be customized in order to show multiple graphs to give even more information about the game. Note that this page is still incredibly accessible by even the most basic smartphones, and would only take a short time to load on mobile data.
I think that people would share this with their friends and family simply because of the national passion for the sport of cricket. If one person in a small village had this app, everyone would want to take a look. The next person who got a smartphone would want this app and it would snowball until it was the ubiquitous cricket app for the masses.
I envisage developing this further into a mathematical education app. Using the wide variety of statistics that all cricket fans love to know, it would be easy to design some very simple functionality that tests basic math skills, and could even range into averaging, plotting graphs, and other statistical analysis, depending on the user.
