Even the most enthusiastic residents of Second Life agree that the client software is plagued by usability problems. The recent announcement that Linden Lab has enlisted the expertise of interface experts Adaptive Path provides grounds for hope that these issues will be addressed in a future release of the Second Life browser.
For those of us in the business of creating compelling content in virtual worlds, it is too easy to put all of the burden for enhancing usability on the shoulders of Linden Lab. After all, in the early days of the web, browsers such as Netscape, Mosaic, Cello, and Internet Explorer were marred by serious interface flaws that degraded the experience of ordinary users. However, web developers eventually realized that their own coding and design practices played a much bigger role in determining whether or not a site was usable. Then, as today, the true culprit was the tendency to design sites without considering the user.
In the hopes of fast-forwarding through years of usability-impaired design, we are launching this thread to collect a list of annoyances that people experience when navigating virtual worlds. If you are a virtual world developer or user, what aspects of Second Life builds do you find most troubling? For that matter, what do you find bothersome in any virtual world that invites user-created content? After collecting a sufficiently lengthy list of user gripes and recommendations, we will reverse-engineer a checklist of positively-worded guidelines for virtual world developers.
Please note that this thread is not concerned with flaws in the virtual world browsers themselves. The emphasis should be placed on aspects of the islands, buildings, objects, and scripts that users contribute to these worlds.
To kick things off, here are a few of the things that I have noticed recently. (Note: Thanks to Marvel Ousley of SLNN for chipping in a few of her own pet peeves.)
- Islands that lack any sort of map, requiring users to wander around until they find the desired location. The absence of “top-sight” makes it very difficult for users to understand where they are supposed to go. The recent trend toward interactive maps is a terrific solution to this problem.
- Buildings (usually storefronts) that force users to wait because they’ve packed too many objects into the space and have not paid attention to the size of their textures.
- Malls in which stores seem to be placed haphazardly without any attention to logic, and stores in which goods are scattered throughout the building without any explanation of why certain products are located in certain places. Think about how easy it is to figure out the location of men’s shoes in unfamiliar department stores, and how easy it is to track down milk, eggs, and fresh vegetables in unfamiliar grocery stores. Wouldn’t it be wonderful to see similar accessibility in most Second Life establishments?
- Venues in which teleportation controls, tip jars, and other meaningful interactive objects are buried from sight.
- Sites that don’t deliver any sort of contextual instructions to newcomers. I once stumbled into a Gorean island in which newcomers immediately received a set of notecards describing the basic premise of the role-playing environment. I was less than thrilled by the patriarchal ideology, but admired the Goreans’ commitment to usable design.
- Interactive objects and scripts that rely on the ugly blue dialog boxes for user interaction. I realize that there are serious limitations in the current platform, but these boxes should be avoided as much as possible.
- Interactive objects, HUDs, and scripts that chastise the user for making mistakes. A well-written script should make it almost impossible for users to screw up. If the user does make a mistake, error messages should be non-chiding and clearly worded.
- The absence of a logical naming convention for objects, notecards, textures, and locations. We all love to complain about the inadequate search tools, but developers could do much more to improve the findability of their own creations. Back in the 1990s, I worked at an enormous gaming company that controlled much of the role-playing game market. During the middle of the summer, we launched a completely revamped version of the main site. Unfortunately, in our haste to launch, we had used the same name in every single TITLE tag.
- Search result: Sorcerers of the Hills
- Search result: Sorcerers of the Hills
- Search result: Sorcerers of the Hills
- Search result: Sorcerers of the Hills
We had to push back the launch date by almost a week as everyone scrambled to assign more meaningful titles. It’s a funny story, and I’m often reminded of this nightmare every time I try to search my inventory for an article of clothing that was given a useless name (e.g. a pair of pants called “Creations by Charlie!”) by its creator.
- Stairs that are too high, stairs that are too narrow, and winding ramps that force people to hit a convoluted combination of movement keys in order to ascend. This last item is particularly problematic for users with older, slower computers.
- Open-to-the-public sims that don’t allow people to walk through the walls.
These are some of the items on my list, but I realize that this is just scratching the surface. What do you think?
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