[sldev] Voice

[Second Life]

I've been campaigning for a LONG time against this interface. I've bee 
telling everyone I know to DL it and voice their honest opinions everywhere 
they can.

It seems geared 100% towards the noob player. If you have < 5 friends and 
only 1-2 IM windows open at once it's mostly not too bad. But if you have 
100 friends in your list, 30 of which may be on at once and 8 IM windows 
open then the conflicting demands of the required aspect ratios of the IM 
windows and the friends list window becomes absurd.

LL is committing a grievous UI design sin. "Design for noobs at the expense 
of the experienced/daily user" Noobs are only noobs for a few days, they are 
then loyal customers of much much longer (if you don't screw them).

The UI should be easy /enough/ for noobs, possibly with a nice default 
layout of all the windows as a "suggested" stating point, but has to remain 
completely customizable for experienced users. You cant force EVERYONE to 
use the thing in Fischer-Price mode forever :( Why Linden Lab seems to 
continuously reinvent the wheel without taking or looking at outside 
experiences is just beyond me.

There has so far been one small concession in the history window with the 
1.18 FL client that makes that bit of it much more palatable but there are 
may many other features just completely wrong with it.

LL has not yet confirmed if they are going to release this new chat 
interface at the same time as voice. They don't have to, and I hope they 
don't. If they do, I see a completely redesigned Open Source version of it 
in the near future...

Farallon

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Nicholaz Beresford" <nicholaz at blueflash.cc>
To: "Tateru Nino" <tateru.nino at gmail.com>
Cc: "Second Life Developer Mailing List" <sldev at lists.secondlife.com>
Sent: Saturday, July 28, 2007 7:55 AM
Subject: Re: [sldev] Voice


>
> Tateru Nino wrote:
>> Nicholaz Beresford wrote:
>>> Also, I'd like to know how much set in stone the
>>> communication center design is (in my personal opinion
>>> that dialog is quite underwhelming and will most likely
>>> cause a major uproar when it becomes mandatory for all).
>
>> Everyone I've spoken to inworld seems to regard the new interface as a
>> step backwards. Harder to use to the point of broken and unintuitive.
>> That's subjective, of course, relative to the current interface - I
>> don't know how someone coming in fresh would view it.
>
> LOL, so far I've always smiled a bit (condescendingly) when
> people referred to Wednesdays and other updates as downgrades
> but with this part of the interface I'll actually agree to
> using this word.  Until today I've heard about the communication
> window just from forum and comments and thought it won't be
> that bad ... but I must say it is bad.
>
> There are things which I like (treating the chat (near me) the
> same as an IM, but I have no idea what the reasoning is behind
> putting the contacts in that window.  But the rest is just looks
> borked and cluttered (this may be just me however, with my own
> software I have spent days aligning options dialogs down to the
> pixel).  To me it just looks like an explosion in the gui element
> factory.
>
>
> Nick
> ---
> Second Life from the inside out:
> http://nicholaz-beresford.blogspot.com/
>
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