The whole point of Scorebook is to make scoring easy. Simple as that.
I’ve volunteered at the volleyball score table for years, keeping the book and learning the pains, nuances, and rules of high school volleyball. I know how much goes into doing it well. I also know that even when you’ve been doing it for years, you still make mistakes. Correcting them can be a job of its own.
That experience got me thinking about digitizing the process. What could an app take off the bookkeeper’s plate? How much easier could this job become?
I want Scorebook to be ridiculously easy to use. Easy enough to put a smile on the face of someone who has kept the book for years and knows exactly how much work it can be.
That’s the goal I keep coming back to as I build it.
Years at the table gave me plenty of ideas
Keeping the book means following the match while maintaining an accurate record of it. You’re tracking service order, substitutions, timeouts, and everything else that needs to go on the sheet. You have to understand the rules and know how to record what happened.
Once you’ve learned the paper scoresheet, you appreciate how much information it holds. But you also recognize how much of the work falls on you. You’re maintaining counts, putting information in the right places, and checking your entries while continuing to watch the court.
And then there are corrections. Nobody gets every entry right every time. You need to figure out what happened, fix the record, and keep going.
After years of doing this, I had plenty of ideas about where software could help. If I’ve already entered the lineup, why shouldn’t the app help track who serves next? If I record a substitution, why shouldn’t it handle the count and the corresponding notation? If I enter something incorrectly, why shouldn’t correcting it be straightforward?
Those questions became the starting point for Scorebook.
Making it simple takes a lot of work behind the scenes
There are almost 50,000 lines of code behind Scorebook. There’s database work, synchronization between devices, and the work of translating national and state volleyball rules into application behavior.
That’s a lot going on behind a screen where someone might just tap to record a point.
Good. That’s where I want the complexity to live.
The bookkeeper should be able to enter what happened and have the app handle the details that follow from it. They shouldn’t have to enter the same information several times or figure out how the software works internally to keep a match moving.
Every piece of that underlying system has to support the same goal: make scoring easy. That goal drives the architecture just as much as it drives the buttons on the screen.
I chose to make it work on the phone first
If Scorebook becomes widely used, I imagine an iPad would be a great device to have at the table. The extra screen space makes sense for this kind of work.
But I decided to focus on the phone. It’s the device volunteers are most likely to already have with them, and I wanted them to be able to use it.
That decision led to a lot of iteration. Phone screens come in different sizes and resolutions. Something that feels comfortable on one can feel cramped on another. Turn the phone sideways and you have a different set of space constraints.
I went through the pain of working through those differences because I didn’t want to pass that pain along to the bookkeeper.
Number entry is a good example. A keypad needs to be large enough to use comfortably, but it also needs to leave you able to see what you’re entering. A popup needs to fit on the screen and stay connected to the field you tapped. Moving from one lineup position to the next should feel natural.
Getting those details right took repeated adjustments. I’d try an interaction on a phone, find something awkward, change it, and try again. Sometimes an idea that looked useful added too much clutter. Sometimes a working feature still took too many taps.
“Can I use this on a phone?” was only the starting point. I wanted to get to “This is easy to use on my phone.”
Getting into the app had to be easy too
That same thinking led to how volunteers access Scorebook.
I didn’t want someone helping at a match to have to create an account, choose a password, and learn a login process before they could keep score. That would be adding another task before they could do the one they volunteered for.
But access still needed to be protected. A volunteer needed their own session, with access to the match and the role they were there to perform.
The approach I designed uses a match invitation. An administrator assigns a role, such as Scorekeeper or Libero Tracker, and the volunteer scans a QR code or opens the invitation link. That takes them into a protected session for that match.
No account to create. No password to remember. They arrive at the tools they need for their job.
There’s work behind the scenes to establish that session and control what it can access. For the volunteer, joining should be a simple step on the way to keeping the book.
I care about that part of the experience just as much as recording a point. Making scoring easy starts before the first serve.
“It works” is only part of the test
When I use Scorebook, I’m looking at it as someone who has done the job.
Can I find what I need? Is the next action obvious? Why did that take three taps? If I make a mistake, can I fix it and move on?
Those questions drive the design. A feature might work correctly and still need another pass because it feels awkward or asks too much of the user.
My experience helps me spot those problems, but feedback from other people matters too. I know what I intended a screen to do. Watching someone else use it tells me whether I made that clear.
I want a new volunteer to find the job more approachable. I want an experienced bookkeeper to notice how much routine work the app is handling for them. Both should be able to focus more of their attention on the match.
That’s why I built Scorebook, and it’s how I judge whether it’s getting better.
If you’ve kept the book for years and find yourself smiling because something that used to be a pain is suddenly easy, that’s exactly what I’m going for.