Back, just before Halloween, a Linden Lab staffer accidentally sent an email intended for internal circulation to a mailing list containing quite a number of Second Life users. We were sent a copy a few minutes later, and the email was widely circulated among developers of third-party Second Life viewers by Halloween.
What caught people's eye about the email was how harsh it was when it came to describing aspects of the upcoming Second Life Viewer 2.0 user-interface (the key feature of that software). It certainly didn't pull many punches leveling criticism at various design choices that were obviously in evidence in the evaluation version that had come up for testing.
And for just that reason we are, after a little thought, rather heartened by it.
The email represents a rather revealing (if accidental) look behind the scenes at the Lab's design and testing processes.
If you think the actual users are persnickety about the design decisions the Lab makes, well, the Lab seems to get there the first with the most.
Usually, we don't see any of the design and development process, where they hammer away on different designs and try to figure out the best way of doing things. We just see the results when they finally show them, and complain that they don't meet our needs.
We poked the Lab about it last week, and Tom Hale (Linden Lab's chief product officer) told us, "The email summarized some critical feedback from the external group of alpha testers our new Viewer project, and while the tone of the email doesn't fit its now broad audience, the feedback it summarizes is actually a key part of the design process."
"The new Viewer is currently in alpha, features are still in development, and the design for the communications tools and other features is not yet fully implemented. At this stage, the feedback from our alpha testers – Lindens and non-Lindens – helps us figure out the best way of doing things. Software development is an iterative process, and we'll continue to iterate and integrate feedback from our testers until the design meets our goals of making Second Life more intuitive to use. If you'd like to be included in the beta testing for the new Viewer, please email us at beta@lindenlab.com."
We think that this goes to show that the folks at the Lab really are thinking about this stuff, even when we think they aren't, and even when we don't see it. They may even be harsher critics of their own work at times than we are.
Of course, we'll know how much of this feedback has been taken on board once we get our first official look at Viewer 2.0.
The email in question is frankly fairly long, so we'll just bring you a thousand or so words from the heart of it. The Alphaville Herald has published the full, nearly 4,000 word email.
Perhaps the application that all instant messaging is based upon is Mirabilis ICQ. This application was really the first to organize chat tools in such a manner that an intuitive interface was produced. It includes a quick overview of friends and whether or not they are online, it clearly lists the friend's name/nickname and provides quick interactivity with any chosen friend by clicking on their name.
When a message is received, an ICQ message will flash or light up, you are given an option for the type of alert that you prefer to receive. The person sending the message can be found easily because their name is displayed clearly.
Does the current SL viewer do this? - Yes
Does Viewer 2.0 do this? - No.
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Viewer 2.0 reduces the easy to find name into an icon on a taskbar that takes up about 1/8th of the viewable area that should be made available for viewing the amazing 3d world that is Second Life. Even though it eats up all of that real estate, it does nothing to make finding the person you wish to speak with any easier, it forces you to hunt the icon your friend is hiding behind. Only displaying their name if the cursor is passed over the chiclet. Not even childrens video games attempt to personify others with icons. I know. For the past week I have watched a 4 year old enter several computer games for children that were totally new to her and instantly acclimate to instant messaging without being prompted to click on a ducky or a horsey or any other sort of cute icon to manage it.
Is this efficient? No.
Does this make the interface more intuitive? No.
Does this do anything to bolster the viewers usefulness to those that are vision impaired or possess other disabilities? No.
Are most people generally accustomed to using chat in this manner? No.
Is this graphical bloat? - Yes.
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Mirabilis ICQ was one of the first to introduce file sharing via drag and drop.
Is this present in the current viewer? - Yes.
Is this present in viewer 2.0? - Yes
The current viewer is far more efficient at this since it is virtually impossible to do in 2.0 with both the inventory and profile screens residing in the sidebar.
Intuitive? Nope.
Efficient? Hardly.
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Mirabilis ICQ and almost every other Instant Messaging program allows fonts to be resized in IM.
Is this present in the current viewer? No.
Is this present in 2.0? No.
If you want to make things easy for residents to understand, allow them to make the instructions and other functions of the interface easy to read.
They just might stay in SL given the opportunity that option lends them.
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Many chat programs allow for tabbed Instant Messages.
Grouping IMs into the same window to make them more manageable via tabbing was and is insanely desirable in any other chat program I have ever used. Add ons were created for that specific purpose and people flocked to them. Software developed specifically around this much wanted feature was once produced by BPS Software ( http://www.bpssoft.com/ ) for AOL and AIM until finally AOL and AIM decided to incorporate this feature themselves. There are several add-ons for Yahoo Messenger that allow instant messages to be collected and organized into a tabbed window. YTunnelPro (http://www.ytunelpro.com/ )is an example of software that allows for that convenience as well as other security functions in Yahoo Messenger.
I saw those programs come into their own. I know and worked with some of the people that developed those products and they do very, very well with them.
I hope you can appreciate how difficult it is to be objective with regard to certain portions of the chat tools when I saw so many chat users rush to purchase these tools back when many people were still quite paranoid about using a credit card online. They did though and they did it in great numbers because tabbed instant messaging proved to be an acceptable and intuitive way to understand and organize chat.
Does the current viewer have tabbed IMs? Yes.
Does 2.0 have tabbed IMs? No.
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Conclusion.
There is a lot that ain't broke that could use a lil help but it don't need fixin'. There are new things that aren't making things easy to understand and they are showing themselves to be inefficient at this point. I want it to work, but there are 30 years of trial and error behind the psychologies and technologies that make IM and chat intuitive to the general population.
I think we may be able to build a stronger. more efficient mousetrap but it seems unlikely at this point that we are heading in the direction of a better one.
Personally I find the small, non-resizeable chat windows pretty unuseable and I find myself reverting to using the (Legacy) Communications window, can't wait to see the replacement for it. Also I
find on the People side panel, Friends tab, where it lists online friends at the top and then all friends on the bottom to be not very intuitive, most people are used to things like IM clients having online lists on top and offline lists below that.
Summary:
Our meeting on Tuesday was fun and very productive. We work well together.
A lot of this week was getting around to communications issues we have previously brought up at meetings, and in our last few week summaries. Cosmetic issues still plauge nearby chat, more then a handful of people talking at once is not readable. Nearby chat toasts for object's chat do not handle icons right, showing the last speaker's/a random users icon instead. And a handful of font issues.
Many group chat functions are not implimented yet. But we did manage to explore group chat as much as we could. One issue that occured to me is that many groups do not have an
insignia/picture, this makes their IM chicklets unidentifiable.
New users also have no profile picture, again making their chicklets unidentifiable.
"Share" is still a mystery to me...
I think with a bit of touching up the communications system will work out, most usability problems are cosmetic issues.
Summary of testing experience:
Major bugs prevent me from using the viewer full time (mostly non display of object IMs which is a show stopper for me, I see the issue is marked fixed in JIRA, but has not yet trickled down to our build).
I hope we get a new build soon that will allow for continuous daily use of the viewer 02.
This week we were testing the communication tools, while I reported the actual bugs that I was able to find, I think this is the right place to mention that still after 3 weeks of using the new interface that particular part feels like it would need a major design rethink.
As it stands now, it's a step back in usability compared to the current production viewer.
Major problems with it:
- Local chat breaks the feeling of immersion and conversation flow, it's too much in-your-face.
- Local chat log has maximal size, and cannot be re-sized beyond that.
- Local chat log does not become translucent when it loses focus
- IM/Group chat is not re-sizable and they don't remember their docked/undocked state and position
- No easy way to switch between conversations, such as with keyboard to cycle through local chat, IMs and Group IMs
- All incoming messages are treated the same, making it very easy to miss very important ones. For example, region restart message will disappear quickly if you have an active group IM chat going.
- Working with scripted objects while you are participating in an active Group chat becomes almost impossible. llDialog windows get moved around by incoming messages making you chaise them all over the screen in an attempt to click on the right button.
- Same goes for hitting permissions dialogs from scripted objects.
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