[sldev] Voice

Second Life sl at phoca.com
Tue Jul 31 21:12:10 PDT 2007


Soft,

Thanks for replying to this thread.

Believe me it is not merely resistance to change. There is a fatal flaw in 
the design as it sits that should be corrected.

There are many minor issues with the chatterbox but one stands out above all 
the rest. I have been using the FL client for about 80% of my SLing, 8 hours 
a day for the last two months. And on the occasions when I go back to the 
standard client it is a RELIEF.

I have taken several snapshots to try to illustrate the problem and it all 
stems from having a large number of :friends and trying to deal with several 
IMs at once where the chatter box is completely deficient in usability.

Image 1: My normal, every day, always open window set. History and IM with 
enough space for 8-9 IMs before scrolling sets in and then I can enlarge it 
quite a bit sideways without using up any more real usable screen 
real-estate (eating up the mini map of course).

http://www.seal-cove.com/chatterbox/Current.jpg

Image 2: Now, when I want to check on the friends list, it is a simple click 
away, click on, browse the entire list of "on-line" friends without even 
scrolling, click off when done. Extremely fast and efficient. And even when 
I want to leave it open to check on things real-time It's still relatively 
compact and out of the way, and I can see it and my IM windows at the same 
time. This is unusual but happens sometimes, nice to have that option.

http://www.seal-cove.com/chatterbox/Current-WithFriendsList.jpg

Image 3: Chatterbox, trying to maintain the same setup as I normally use in 
image 1. Note that it is immediately and uselessly larger than it needs to 
be for IMs as compared to before. Why? because of the friends list that is 
wedged in there. Now look at even trying to use the friends list, I can only 
see 4.5 names at a time. I've never used the scroll wheel so much in SL as 
trying to look up and down my friends list in this configuration :(

http://www.seal-cove.com/chatterbox/Chatterbox-IMs.jpg

Image 4: I tried this for a while, making the chatterbox more friends list 
friendly, but then you can only manage 2-3 IM windows before having to 
annoyingly scroll them, and the aspect ratio for the IMs is not best AND the 
friends list names are pretty scrunched.

http://www.seal-cove.com/chatterbox/Chatterbox-FriendsList.jpg

Image 5: And here is the meat of it, IF you have a lot of friends and don;t 
like constantly scrolling scrolling scrolling AND you want to manage 6-8-10 
IMs at once, here is what you have to have:

http://www.seal-cove.com/chatterbox/Chatterbox-Both.jpg

That is plainly ridiculous. Now go back and look at my image 1 and Image 2 
again, see what I mean by "relief"? And finally, these shots were taken on a 
1920x1200 screen at a UI size of 0.90. How are people on 1024x768 screens 
going to take this? (Which BTW I use on the living room media computer while 
watching TV sometimes)

It should be fairly plain what the problem is: The friends list and the IM 
window /demand/ opposite aspect ratios for best usage and having them 
attached like that makes one or the other very hard to use.

The solution isn't that hard: Make the friends list detachable and put a 
button to show/hide it back on the button bar.

As I said there are plenty of other smaller problems but if this ONE big 
backwards step were put right, then I think I and most everyone else I've 
talked too just might be able to "get used to it".

Thank you for looking.

Farallon Greyskin









----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Soft Linden" <soft at lindenlab.com>
To: "Nicholaz Beresford" <nicholaz at blueflash.cc>
Cc: "Second Life Developer Mailing List" <sldev at lists.secondlife.com>
Sent: Tuesday, July 31, 2007 5:57 PM
Subject: Re: [sldev] Voice


> I've seen a lot of comments about the new chatterbox panel, mostly
> negative. For me (and I think many other Lindens), it's hard to tell
> how many of the comments are resistance to changing something so
> fundamental and familiar, and how much is real usability breakage. I
> know I get pretty attached to one way of doing things after being
> exposed to it for so long.
>
> The design isn't set in stone, although what you see now will be,
> roughly, what you see in the first release. Posting specific requests
> and shortcomings as JIRAs will help a lot in evolving this into
> something better-received, and many thanks to those of you who have
> posted comments.
>
> The bHear team will be pushing to have the final source released at
> the same time as, or just before, the official launch. If you've got
> things you'd like to change yourselves, you might visit Benjamin
> Linden's usability office hours to propose ideas in advance and to
> highlight existing chatterbox JIRAs you want to act on, based on your
> reactions to the First Look version. If we see patches that
> specifically note that you already ran an implemented idea by
> Benjamin, we should be able to bring them in pretty quickly.
>
>
> On 7/28/07, Nicholaz Beresford <nicholaz at blueflash.cc> wrote:
>>
>> I just tried the voice first look for the first time
>> today and read the blog post about a mandatory FL on
>> Monday and integration in to the main viewer.
>>
>> Is there are roadmap for this (time-wise and in relation
>> to the non-voice viewer)?
>>
>> 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).
>>
>>
>> Nick
>> --
>> Second Life from the inside out:
>> http://nicholaz-beresford.blogspot.com/
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