I was so excited about the new Second Life viewer that promised to revolutionize and simplify the SL experience has fallen incredibly short of even the most modest expectations. While there’s no question the new features, such as HTML on a prim and synchronized experiences with shared media are vastly promising, it seems that with those two steps forward we took two massive leaps back in terms of streamlining the actual user experience.
Let me tell you about a couple of the things that immediately lept out at me as imposing. Firstly, your viewable screen is not considerable smaller. At the top you not only have the traditional menu bar, nut now an address bar, and a favorites bar cutting off a good inch. The (unscalable) sidebar.. that big, icon filled sidebar jumping off the edge of my screen and, when opened, occupies an enormous portion of my field of view – in fact, in early half my screen becomes dedicated to it. Larger HUD attachments must now be moved to the left side for the user to be able to click on it. Part of the beauty of Second Life has always been immersion. We currently possess the ability to navigate our world and partake of it’s indelible beauty unobstructed. We feel part of it, our screen is our virtual eyes… now, the presence of this sidebar makes it feel more like we’re running a program on our Operating system. It feels like a mechanical device. It no longer presents us with an organic experience and has instead become typical. Dare I say, even antiquated. There is little innovative about how this UI was built or implemented.
The address bar at the top baffled me. At first I thought that Second Life was now going to behave like a browser. Was it the new Internet Explorer? But, truth be told, I cannot see a purpose for it. It seems like the pinnacle of redundancy in terms of navigation in Second Life. We have a plethora of way we travel. We have landmarks, we have clickable slurls, integrated search, profiles picks, the ability to teleport each other, we have the map. Now, apparently we have an address bar at the top of the viewer where, and I promise you, no user will ever type in a Slurl to go to a location. Our Slurls are quite lengthy, and the sim names can be absolutely ridiculous. Nobody wants to spend 5 minutes trying to figure out how to spell a 13 letter Japanese sim name and approximate x,y,z coordinates. And if they know the sim name and approximate coordinates – AND how to compile a hefty Slurl, wouldn’t they copy and paste it into chat and click on it to teleport like many of us do already?
Blame it on the fact that I’ve had lengthy experience with the current viewer that I believe this new viewer experience to be created by developers (20 of them, apparently.) who have never stepped foot in our world for any significant amount of time as a real residents and have no idea how we interface with our tools. Another example of this is the pie menu which we’re about to bid farewell to in lieu of the common dropdown menu. People in Second Life are busy. They’re moving at a constant pace, they muti-tasking, chatting, creating… Now, when they click to edit anything, with a slight twist of the wrist to the left or right, up or down, they can hit their preferred mark without even looking. Users are conditioned to the direction of their specific choice. How many of us were thrown for a loop when the “Detach All” option moved to a different space on the pie menu and accidentally found ourselves in full undress at inopportune times until we retrained our actions? It’s much easier to navigate a pie and associate our behavior with a direction than a dropdown. I can actually navigate the pie menu with my interface off during filming. I don’t even need to see it; just know the direction I need to move my curser.
The interface as it stands performed in a way that was inherent to the way users interacted with Second Life. It’s not World Of Warcraft – we don’t need shiny buttons to execute behaviors. By many standards our interface was even more simplistic than the average game interface. We didn’t have to worry about hotbars, sequenced behaviors, combat bars, crafting keys, macros, ect. It did what it said on the tin. Inventory was inventory. Map was map. Search was search. Advanced, you knew was a place you’d not play with unless you knew what you were doing, and it wasn’t necessary to the experience to play with those options. The “File, Edit, World..” dropdowns at the top of the screen was as close to a browser in Second Life as I believed was necessary. They were similar enough to my browser for me to feel familiar with their actions, but they didn’t try to simulate a web browser or gaming experience in an environment that was neither. Perhaps the belief that Viewer 2 needed to function like a browser for people who don’t interact and only remain in static environments like web pages is why the developers left us only a tiny thumbnail for a chat window. Because we really don’t talk to each other.
That said, the new viewer is desperately unfriendly. I rezzed in bald. The lag was amplified threefold. It was 2003 again, and I might as well have been in Reaction grid or OpenSim because it felt like a fake Second Life. A poor man’s virtual reality. Apparently, this experience is not exclusive to me, given that a recent interview on Metaverse TV, Amanda Linden and Viewer Product manager Espy Linden were both told by the hosts that the viewer left much to be desired. However, in typical Linden fashion, it’s not unfair to presume that they computed that as “OMG, WE LOVE IT!”
That’s not to say there aren’t features to love that come packaged in the new viewer. However, I liken it to getting a big, pretty gift box and opening it to find a nugget of gold ensconced in a gelatin of poo. It’s unfortunate what you have to go through to get to the reward. The company has this habit of introducing new toys instead of fixing older, obnoxious bugs that persist – like the frustrating chat error messages, or the every folder flying open in your inventory search when you’re looking for a specific item in a folder. Or you locate the folder that doesn’t display the contents and have to backspace and have your entire contents instantly expand again. I should be able to search a folder, click on it, view it’s contents instead of playing hide and seek with an item. So much could have been done to improve performance and current customer satisfaction rather than invest resources forcing an entirely new UI down the throats user with the hopes that it will convince new residents to stay.
Which is the goal, ultimately. It’s been said that the new viewer is intended to reduce the severity of the learning curve for new residents, so they are more comfortable with the program. I’m not sure who pitched it like that, or who bought the concept because it’s far from meeting it’s purpose. In fact, the tools remain largely the same, they’re just in different places now, so they do the same things as before, they require the same patience and skill. Nothing is easier… for anyone. Not for veterans, not for new residents. We have glossy new visual features (HTML on a prim, Flash integration, Shared media- Things you have to SEE!) which are the tentpole of the entire device, or at least, how they’re selling it to the community. But the dark, imposing UI doesn’t do the new implementations any justice if we have to navigate around the sidebar to enjoy them. The fact is, new residents will be met with the same obstacles they were met with before, just in a more unfriendly design. And the design isn’t really as spectacular as one might expect from a multi-million dollar company whose sole investment is in web based content. The windows don’t go transparent anymore, it’s a stark black and gray – which doesn’t lend itself to a particularly “Fun” mentality.
But overall, what I found particularly interesting was the profile tab. The side-by-side meme about your Avatar… and the Real Life you. While we’ve always had a first life tab, it was relatively off in left field. It was there for use if you chose to use it, you could peek at anothers should you choose to view it, but it wasn’t in your face. I recently read Raph Koster brilliant blog post entitled “Are Virtual World Over,” wherein he suggest that the days of virtual places being anonymous, fabricated environments for social playtime and pure fun are fading. Now, it appears, we’re headed toward living virtually, rather than conducting a virtual life. We’ll be living in a place where your identity is expected to be disclosed – the real you. Pseudonymity – or screennames, will be a thing of the yesterday experience. He’s not wrong, even social networking sites like twitter will be instituting such features up-front. It’s no longer on sitting on that 5th tab, passively. Now, given that we are all on the internet, and the internet is full of crazies… would that be the first thing that would send a new user running for the hills, having something pop up that wants to advertise their real life name and bio alongside the one they’ve chosen for their Avatar? Corporations like Linden Lab are encouraging us to disclose now because they want to be viewed by the mainstream as less an internet MMO and more a professional environment for enterprise, entrepreneurship and commercial activity. While first life info is still voluntary, Raph believes that we are moving in this direction, and all signs indicate that he’s absolutely correct. Frightening. To quote Mr. Koster who illustrates it best:
Pseudonymity is taking a lot of hits lately. Not only does Facebook insist on real identities, but we have seen Second Life moving to having real life profile data alongside the pseudonym — in the new viewer, your profile shows both of them, right next to each other. And today, Twitter (still pseudonymous) started rolling out discovery via real identity as well…
This new viewer has been said to revolutionize the user experience, but it’s really doing so much more. It’s changing the entire way we interact with our world, what we can expect in terms of result and how it reacts to us in the greater scheme of things.. even how other people interact with us. Cosmetics aside, of course. Regardless, the viewer does have some enthusiasts, those who find it much sleeker, however that demographic is in the minority.
Regardless, Linden Lab will run ahead with this, thumbs positioned tightly in their ear canals humming a happy tune despite the larger populous asking “Why?” That’s become a disappointing and common practice since the large overturn, where most of the original employees who shared the vision for the world left in the scope of a single year. That alone changed the world. Those visionaries who gave us Second Life moved on, leaving a mechanical body behind that is hard focused on commerce. Hence the ever growing chasm developing between the company and the community.
That said, Viewer 2 will eventually be the standardized SL client – one I won’t use. Up until now I’ve only used the official client, although most people I know went on to use Emerald given it powerful features and strong integration- built by residents who know the world and how we interact with it; by people who know what would make the experience more streamlined and convenient and organized. By people who are not Linden Lab developers, unfortunately.
Ultimately, that’s likely where I’ll go too.