Last night, the final presenter in Dusan Writer’s UI Redesign Contest reviewed her design concepts in front of the panel of judges.
Final Presenter - Rheta Shan
Like most of the finalists, Rheta’s design concepts went beyond just making the Viewer simpler for new Residents. Instead, like other entrants of the contest, Rheta wanted to show how to improve the Viewer for all Residents - easy for new users, but powerful and flexible for seasoned Residents.
Rheta noted that it is not the graphical design of the Viewer that is the main problem, rather it’s lack of logic and ease of access. She further pointed that the current Viewer seems more like a mixture of game and chat ui concepts bundled together. Therefore, Rheta’s entry became an entire UI overhaul demonstrating her efforts towards a logical reorganization of the Viewer, making it a true “window into a world.”
The first area of the Viewer she discussed was a navigation bar at the top of the Viewer, where today’s file menu bar resides. In her navigation bar, she bundles location, navigation, movement, and access to areas a Resident visits frequently. Her design makes it easy to tell if you are flying/walking and improves upon today’s Viewer’s location information, but making it an interactive navigation bar. Kudos for that. Rheta also includes navigation history here. When typing the name of a place you wish to visit into the bar, it begins searching places you have visited before, as well as places you have landmarked. I liked Jacek’s comment that it could be the “SLawesome bar.”
I thought her ideas to include buttons on the top bar for adding a landmarks, accessing all Landmarks you have created, and teleporting home were also very useful. I didn’t see a lot of mention of Search and noticed it was not included in the top bar, so I’m wondering if that is included in her nav bar idea, but I’m not sure as of this writing.
Next, Rheta discussed the grouping of items in the bottom bar of her redesigned Viewer. LIke other entrants, she has regrouped buttons, bundling like functions together. First at the left-most corner of the Viewer are chat tools, including text chat, voice, and IM. Next to this, she includes an inbox icon which is where notifications and offline IMs would be held. I liked this idea because it tells you how many messages you have waiting in your inbox. This feature was received very well by those who attended the presentation, as well as the judges panel.
Next on the bottom bar, she includes “World browsers” and “Personal browsers” - which are groups of buttons that represent Search functions and Inventory types, respectively. I do like how Rheta has combined some of the search items together, however, I’m not sure I agreed with giving each a button on the bottom bar. I would rather have one button that pops open the Search (like it does today) and eliminate some clutter on the bottom bar. Last in the bottom button bar are building tools, preferences, and help. Nicely organized and I think it’s of definite benefit to include an easy to spot help button in the Viewer.
Perhaps the only entrant to address contextual menus in the Viewer, Rheta has redesigned the context meny pie menu that appears when you right click on objects, property, and people in SL. She notes, and I completely agree, that the pie menus are a pain to use. Rheta instead introduces the idea of “Inspector Panels”. I love, love, love the ideas she presents here, and I would encourage you to read her full description in her entry PDF. I’ll just include the screenshots here so you can drool along with me.
Another great idea presented by Rheta was the idea of a Picture workbench. Here you can manage how you create movies and take pictures. She includes the ability to crop and resize a photo before you save it, including useful photo aspect ratio options as well. This rules. Rheta also discussed how her workbench concepts would carry over to Prim workbench and appearance workbench. She did include mockups of these items, but I’d love to see them in a future iteration of this design concept.
The last area Rheta covered in her presentation was in improving camera control. In her design, she shows how to make some less than intuitive functions of camera movement into an easy to use interface. She takes all the available camera controls and includes them together, as well as including feedback about your current camera position. I don’t shoot a lot of video in SL currently, because it more often than not crashes my Viewer. But it’s easy to see how Rheta’s concept would work and improve video recording in SL. A great job here.
As with all finalists, Rheta’s presentation was very well received by all in attendance. The panel asked a few questions about functionality and the relocation of certain items (like your L$ balance). Overall, Rheta’s design concepts gave us things to dream we could integrate into the browser tomorrow.
So that wraps up all the finalists presentations. Next steps are for the judges to render their decisions. I’m eagerly awaiting the verdict and would like to update my own vote as a four-way tie between McCabe, Jacek, Damien, and Rheta. Super Viewer, here we come!
You can check out Rheta Shan’s full entry here.
Posted in UX, User Interface, Viewer | Comments (0)
