Grid Life

As I mentioned in a previous post, Second Life® entrepreneur, Dusan Writer, recently held a contest in which Residents were challenged with the task of redesigning the Second Life® Viewer with the following criteria in mind:

• Design an interface for the Second Life client that would improve the experience of a new or inexperienced user.
• Nothing should be added that is not possible in the current Viewer. (Basically, present the current features in a new way).

Last night, each of five finalists presented their concepts to a panel of judges and then participated in a Q&A session. (I should note that Rheta Shan was unable to attend, so she will be presenting to judges in a separate session later this week). The presentation had an impressive turnout, with just under 30 Residents in attendance. What follow is a summary of each presentation and my thoughts about each one.

Presenter #1 - McCabe Maxstead

McCabe discussed how the main goal of his design was the maximize screen space, allowing Residents as best a view of the 3D world as possible. So in his designs, he’s using the edges and corners of the screen as much as possible.

Rather than a horizontal alignment of buttons, McCabe instead chose a vertical alignment, noting that with so many people running widescreen displays now, vertical real estate is at a premium. So by stacking buttons and UI components vertically, he can afford large menu bars that run horizontally and further shrink your view of the world.

McCabe said he sought to make the new user experience less overwhelming by making his design very modular and that each element designed would appear in sequence. So as a new Resident begins to interact in Second Life®, UI elements would be made available gradually. First, displaying the chat bar, and the left drawer with a singl eicon. Each of the icons on the left bar of McCabe’s design is meant to represent skills that Residents, both new and old, need to master.

All of the communication elements in McCabe’s design have been grouped and moved to the lower left of the Viewer.

I won’t go over every detail of McCabe’s presentation, as I think his design speaks for itself. But overall, I liked McCabe’s entry. My favorite enhancement he presented was the reworked Build floater (shown in the above screenshot as the ‘Prim Edit’ floater). Though the floater itself seems to take up more space which could be frustrating when working on a large build, I do like the organization of the floater. The icons that display the differences between position, rotation, and size are also quite nice and would be an asset to new builders, but I think they could be reduced in size so as not to require so much real estate in the floater. McCabe describes another great feature introduced by his “Prim Editing” enhancements:

“All prims can be profile cut, with profile cuts being renamed to “Slice” for boxes. The button next to the begin/end spinners is a cornering button. Clicking any one of the corners will chop 1/4th out of a prim for that particular cut, allowing for quick halving and quartering without remembering the default numbers (a pain for even experienced users).”

Overall, I think McCabe’s ideas are a good baseline for some much needed UI modifications. By allowing for more screen real estate, and surfaving items like an easily accessible “Worn” tab that allow you to see what you’re wearing make his entry a very worthy contender.

The panel of judeges mostly asked questions about the communications tools and how his design affords more screen real estate. As McCabe’s entry was very much a wireframe UI approach, I’d be interested to see it skinned to get a better idea of the size of the design elements proposed.

You can check out McCabe Maxstead’s full entry here.

Presenter #2 - Jacek Antonelli

I won’t go into as much detail about Jacek’s presentation, as I covered it in a post several days ago. However, I will say that Jacek’s entry was very well received by the panel and the Residents in attendance.

In her presentation, Jacek noted that her design ideas have also been receiving some very positive feedback, which includes some nods from the Lindens. So Dusan and finalists take note, the Lindens are listening!

As she did at least week’s UX office hour, Jacek stressed that part of the strength of her design is the feasibility of its implementation. As someone who is familiar with the Viewer codebase, Jacek went to great lengths to ensure that each UI enhancement she included was something that is achieveable today.

Jacek’s entry features a customizable toolbar on the bottom right of the Viewer. This toolbar would include functions that a new Resident would need as their begin their second life. It is them customizable, so that older Residents can include the tools for which they wish to have quick access. A nice feature, but I wonder what the best way would be to educate new Residents about the features that are not included in the toolbar; the build tools, as an example. Just as is necessary today, a significant amount of education would be required to teach newer Residents about the hidden features of the Viewer.

Like McCabe Maxstead’s design, Jacek’s entry includes a grouping of all the communication tools available to Residents. In Jacek’s design, it’s referred to as the social corner. A nice touch is that she has proposed a cleaner IM notification pop-up which would tell you how many IMs you had waiting.

My favorite part of Jacek’s design is the reworked Inventory floater. For those of us with out-of-control inventories, her ideas gave me hope that I could tame that wild beast! In addition to surfacing the assetΩ quick filter in a nice way, she’s also included tabs/shortcuts for items currently worn, as well as favorites. Jacek noted that by right-clicking on any inventory item or folder, it could be designated a favorite, which would then be accessible via the Favorites tab.

The panel asked questions about the IM notifications, asking if they would tell you who was IM’ing you, and Jacek and a few other Residents suggested that although her designs do not included it, that the notifications could display the name and then fade it after a second or two, which is a great idea.

As I said in my previous post, I really like the ideas Jacek has presented, but again, have some concerns over the size of the individual UI elements which feel like they might be intrusive (ie. the size of the “social corner”.

You can check out Jacek Antonelli’s full entry here.

Presenter #3 - Damien Fate

First, after the amazing launch of Loco Pocos a couple of weeks ago, I have no idea where Damien found the time to create this contest entry. So I applaud him for his efforts.

Damien’s design focused on three areas of the Viewer: the top menu bar, the bottom/chat bar, and the Inventory. His first enhancement - small, costmetic change, as making the mini-map a circular element instead of the square it is today. This was mainly a personal preference change, but it does make the map feel a little cleaner - more like a small radar.

In the top menu bar, Damien also introduced back and forwards buttons on either side of the location information. Clicking the drop-down buttons with these will display the places you have been to and allow a Resident to quickly teleport back to a place they have visited previously. Some members of the audience and the judging panel stated that they would prefer an intermediary “go” button of sorts instead of just clicking an item in the list and then automatically teleporting there.

Next, Damien discussed the idea of introduced a “Sell L$” option in the top menu in the form of a drop down. He stated this would make it easier for Residents to not only buy, but to sell L$ more easily. As someone who does not frequently sell Linden’s I’m not sure what the value of this feature is, especially for a newer user. But I can see it’s benefit as a quick access option for store owners and landlords. Perhaps it could be an option that could be turned on in the Viewer Preferences.

For the bottom bar of the Viewer, Damien presented ideas for three levels, each surfacing gradually more functionality. The first level, for new Residents, would include basic navigation and communication tools. The second level adds more buttons including media options. Finally, the third level would have all of the features represented in today’s Viewer, in addition to Appearance mode, View Alpha, View Scripted, View Physical, and Simulator Stats. I do like the layout of the buttons, stylistically, and the options for different levels, but I’d definitely like to be able to customize the buttons available on that third level. In addition, because the third level does occupy a lot of screen real estate, I’d like to be able to slide the buttons down, like a drawer so that I can easily get it out of the way.

Finally, in the Inventory, Damien noted that he didn’t changed the visual appearance of the Inventory, rather he introduced some new features he felt are currently lacking in todays’ Viewer. The first was a view button which allows you to filter a specific asset type in your inventory. Damien acknowledged this is a hidden sort filter in the current Viewer, and like Jacek, he chose to surface it in his design. Like the other finalists, Damien also discussed a favorites tab in the Inventory, which is always well received by Second Life® residents.

I feel like Damien’s design is very strong and again, represents some great ideas for the Viewer. I would love to see some design treatments and customization with some of the menus, but I like the direction he has chosen.

You can check out Damien Fate’s full entry here, here, and here. (Note: these are PDFs!)

Presenter #4 - Roy Cassini

Roy’s design sought to improve the current interface, not by looking at it as a flawed or bad design, but to help organize the features to better fit a Resident’s actions in Second Life®

The first design suggestion presented by Roy is a client-side tutorial that could be used to replace the troublesome Oreintation and Help Island experiences that plague new user retention today. His tutorial would progressively introduce the new user to Second Life® and the features of the Viewer’s user interface.

Next, Roy chose to represent a lot of the UI elements in panels that can be docked to the side of the Viewer and exposed as the user wishes, but presenting an initial prioritization of the panels. He also noted Resident response to Dazzle and presented a much darker interface design than any I’ve seen to date.

Also interested, and commented on by the panel was the search bar in the Viewer, which was moved to the center of the top menu (thus moving location information to the right). I have to admit that I still don’t follow the logic behind this UI decision. However, several members of the panel and the audience mentioned that they didn’t even realize that the current Viewer has a search box at the top right. Interesting, indeed.

You can view Roy Cassini’s full entry here.

Presenter #5 - Vincent Nacon

The last presenter of the night was Vincent Nacon. Vincent discussed some of his experiences with the current Viewer and dislike of some of the features introduced over the past year. One item in particular was the Communicate window. His design showed incoming IM notifications not just appearing as a single notification, but as separate notifications for each IM so you could see who it was from. I tend to agree with a few of the panel judges that this could create a lot of clutter in the interface, something I need a lot less of.

Another feature of Vincent’s design was surfacing permissions options for each item in the Inventory, so you can easily check boxes on permissions without having to look at the properties or rez the object to set it’s perms. I like this idea, and think it could be worked into a larger Inventory overhaul to help speed the work of Resident builders and designers.

Overall, I enjoyed Vincent’s presentation and felt he had some good ideas for enhancements to the Viewer, but the concepts and logic behind some of the design decisions seemed like they were still in their early stages and could use some more work. I’d be interested to see this again after a few more iterations.

You can check out Vincent Nacon’s full entry here: Design 1, Design 2, Design 3, Design 4, Design 5, Design 6, Design 7.

The Next Steps

At the close of the presentations last night, Dusan Writer said that the panel would be meeting with Rheta Shan sometime over the next few days to review her presenation and then final judging would take place thereafter.

I was very excited to hear that New World Notes would be hosting a poll for Residents to allow them to choose their favorite designs. It will be great to see what the larger SL community thinks of the contest and the ideas presented. Writer will also be highlighting the entries at Metanomics on August 4th. The designs will be reviewed on Thursday afternoon at the weekly UX office hours as well, and I encourage anyone interested to attend - it’s always a great hour of discussion.

Finally, Dusan didn’t get into much detail, but he did indicate that there would be a follow-up, “mash-up style” contest on the horizon!

Oh yeah, one last thing. My vote for the winner of this competition. So far, it’s a tie between McCabe, Jacek, and Damien. I would, however, like to review Rheta’s design a little more closely. If I had my choice, I’d take elements of all the finalist’s entries and create a super Viewer! Hmmmm…

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