[sldev] RE: Second Life User Experience

[Ben Glenn]

Hi Bane (and everyone else),

Thanks for your message! Your timing is fantastic because I was looking for
a good opportunity to jump in and introduce myself. I'm the new User
Experience Designer at Linden Lab, so to answer your question - is there a
person who owns the user experience - there is now! I started at Linden Lab
back in January and my job is to make Second Life easier and more intuitive
for new users and long-time Residents alike.

You expressed frustration that I know is shared by many Residents. Believe
me, I feel your pain! You also hit on an interesting point about the
potential for things to get worse with open source. Initially I had similar
concerns but now I see the open source community as an opportunity to
actually improve user experience. My hope is that we can work together to
tackle many of the tough user interface problems that make Second Life
frustrating to use. It will be an interesting experiment, one I hope you -
and many others - will help make a success.

So by all means, send me your list of UI irritants. Or better yet, file
bugs! I'll also be setting up in-world office hours so you can vent to me
directly. :-) 

And if anyone on the list is interested in joining forces with me to improve
the Second Life user experience, please shoot me an email. I look forward to
working with you!

Ben Glenn
(Benjamin Linden)
User Experience Designer
benglenn at lindenlab.com

-------- Original Message --------
Subject: 	[sldev] Second Life User Experience
Date: 	Sun, 11 Mar 2007 12:13:27 -0800
From: 	Bane Darrow <banedarrow at gmail.com>
To: 	sldev at lists.secondlife.com

Hi all. This is a somewhat general query, and so might not be appropriate
for this list. My apologies if it's not.
 
My question is about the User Experience in Second Life. Is anyone
considering or working on this? It seems to me, from my nearly year of using
SL, that it's one of the most frustrating programs to use. Things take too
many clicks, and too many 'bad UI' decisions. Now that SL has gone Open
Source, I'm honestly quite terrified it will get worse. OSS tends to lack
the uniform coherent user experience that makes programs friendly to use.
 
I might be putting together a list of small little tweaks that I think would
make a world of difference. I'd love to be able to dive into the code, but I
have to be honest with myself that I don't have the time. Is anyone already
doing this? Some examples of 'bad' user experience:
 
* Too many things move or turn your character or camera by side-effect.
     * Right click to edit something turns your avatar to face it. This has
gotten in my way many times
     * Editing appearance does an excruciating slow camera movement before
the window opens. I cannot disable this.
     * After editing appearance, your AV twists around on you.
     * I'm sure there are others. Any time my camera or avatar moves without
me explicitly instructing it, I think this is a BAD experience.
* Inventory becomes essentially unmanageable when you've been around a while
and collected a lot. We need better organizing besides Folders/Search
* Make the console windows movable
* Clicking the menu a second time should close it... (Thought I saw this in
some patch notes)
 
There's a lot of others, that I'll probably start trying to make a good
list. My question is, is there a person who 'owns' the user experience?
Should there be? I think it needs to be coherent. I believe honestly this is
a barrier to people building and creating good content. The new people
struggle with it too much, and the people who have used it enough get fed up
with frustration. SL has so much potential, but it's gotten to the point
where doing anything but sitting and chatting is just so infuriating. I
never feel this with other programs or games.
 
Bane Darrow