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So the next iteration of Second Life viewer has come along, and it's looking marvelous! I'm actually really impressed. Here's my quick run down of Linden Lab's new monster.

What it has...

Aesthetics

The new client looks absolutely marvelous. Yup I know that sounds like a fairly unimportant thing to talk about, but actually it isn't. How pleasing a GUI is, is far more important than you might think. I recall that there was a paper published last year demonstrating how high aesthetics could actually enhance performance when using interfaces with low usability. The new interface is much more attractive - it's clean and clear, and more inline with the 'HUD' and 'Helvetica' style trends.

Sidebar

I actually mentioned a sidebar in my post at the beginning of the year. Nope I wasn't one of the lucky few who got to try out the alphas in exchange for an NDA (MS and HP give me that privilege ;) ). I'd like to say 'great minds think a-like' but I guess docking all the windows is kind of a logical step to make. Dragging windows all over the place was a huge pain in the ass in the old viewer, so it's not something I miss. I'd love to see the chat windows move onto it too.

Chat

For me the biggest improvements have been made with the chat interface. I love the icons that appear next to each users' contribution, as well as the icon tabs on the bottom of the screen (although these are sometimes too small to work out who's it is). It's also great to be able to chat with a group and see a list of online users in the chat window - no more wondering who did and didn't get the message! I'm not sure why it was felt necessary to move the 'is typing' notification to the top of the window however. That's a little counter-intuitive, and I dont know of any other chat programs that display that kind of message so far from the input box. That's some pretty major saccades that are being forced on the user there. An 'is typing' notification would also work great under the user's name for local chat, it's so annoying when you type over people - and I hate relying on that puppet typewriter pose.

Active Media

I'm guessing that's what it's called. To be honest I haven't watched any of the videos so I don't know. Sorry but we tech guys NEVER watch instructional information. It's like sacrilege! Anyway, this new ability to display any kind of web media on a prim instead of a texture is pretty nifty. It's going to open up huge possibilities for the virtual world, everything from flash gaming and videos to Google Docs and interactive whiteboards can be shown on them. Here's betting that multiplayer flash games become very popular! Unfortunately my viewer crashed when there was too much flash in use... so I'm hoping this doesn't become a new griefer tool.

What it doesn't have...

Context Awareness

There isn't any, except for context aware help. Back when I was working at Hewlett-Packard Labs, I was based with a group who's project was centered entirely around context awareness, making interfaces and information adapt on the basis of where you were and what you were doing. Most of what they did involved GPS, and displaying relevant media based on where you were. Effectively they were doing augmented reality before it was augmented reality, just before they had the power to superimpose stuff over camera streams. The main issue with GPS however, is that it's only a reliable indicator of the physical location of the sensor, not the crucial ever-changing meaningful stuff - what makes sense to display at one time isn't relevant at others. Second Life is in a superb position in that the viewer knows almost everything about a location - no matter what place you're talking about, it knows who's there, what's there, and where that is. It could provide an amazing contextually aware interface. How about a tab that displays reviews pulled from XStreet on the basis of nearby objects? Or status updates pulled from Avatars United for nearby avs? In fact you could open it up completely and pull all kinds of things off the web - flickr pics, tweets, blog posts, machinima - sites that link to that SLurl. Second Life could provide a stream of contextually relevant information that would be totally impossible in the real world. They could even craft a whole ad-platform around it if they wanted to (in-exchange for free premium subscriptions one would hope!).

Land Owner Interface Customisation

I wrote about this in an earlier post where I talked about Microsoft's experience with virtual worlds, and I still think it would be a great idea. In fact I even suggested that it would work best via a sidebar - so now that there is one there's no excuse! Basically it would function as an extended parcel profile, except the owner could specify extra things that would get displayed directly in the visitor's sidebar. I'm talking about things such as a blog feed, flickr photos, promotional stuff, info that would normally get sent out by those automatic notecard givers. That kind of thing. If you were visiting a roleplaying sim for example, a back story and sim rules might be displayed - or a live event might display a program. In essence it's pretty similar to context awareness, but it's entirely human defined.

The User Experience

Old Experienced Users

Experienced users are probably going to be the ones having the hardest time adjusting to the new viewer, simply because they'll have established routines catered around the old viewer. Expect to hear lots of complaints. Truth is, there isn't anything majorly wrong with the new interface. As a psychologist I'd say they're rationalising issues that stem from fighting against the autonomous motor plans that they'd normally use to complete tasks. Now that these well-rehearsed plans are redundant, the user has to try and fight against the temptation to look in particular places, move the cursor to certain parts of the screen etc. As this is all done automatically, the user doesn't have conscious awareness that there old motor plans are the problem and so blame those aspects that they are aware of (i.e. the interface). Eventually this will get easier, and users will get used to the new interface (in other words, the autonomous plans will be adjusted or overwritten).

New Users

It's hard to speak from the viewpoint of a new user, that's pretty much half the point of why we have cognitive ergonomics. It's like looking at those visual illusions, where at first they look like a mess of dots, but suddenly you see the hidden image, at which point, no matter how hard you try, you can't go back to seeing the mess of dots that you used to see. Users (including developers) cannot experience a piece of software from anyone's perspective other than their own. Having said that, it seems to me that the new interface is fairly clean and clear. Certainly there are less buttons and options (this isn't actually an important aspect at all, and in fact a greater number of options can give the illusion of greater control which may sometimes be a good thing), but the amount of button presses needed to access them doesn't seem to be any less. I think it's the aesthetics which will be the thing that gives new users that helping hand, like I mentioned before - better aesthetics leads to better performance.

Will it attract New Users?

Some. I don't think it's really the interface that's the problem when it comes to attracting new users. I mean we've all tried to convince RL friends and family to use Second Life at some point or another - and although they may have said - 'it seems too hard' - how many of them have ever actually looked at the interface close enough to make a judgement like that? The real issue is, what Second Life can offer - and with the ability to use new forms of media in-world, it does offer a few new things. But it doesn't offer many. Much of what it does offer, could already be achieved by having a browser window open simultaneously. I think that showing users what is actually possible in SL is the key, and that comes from marketing, not a new client. Personally I feel that the only user surges that might occur will be short-term users exploring it because they saw it on some website. The same kind of users that would install a new Twitter client because it was featured on Techcrunch, tweet a couple of times, and then never use it again. Haha I'm pessimistic I know, but like I said, it's marketing and better informing potential users that will ultimately improve SL's userbase.

So...

So all in all, a great upgrade so far, with the potential to be fantastic, but I remain to be convinced that it's going to result in huge numbers of new users.

(Hopefully) Related posts:

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