OK. So, I throw out the sacred cows and you guys have convinced me – it’s a sacred cow for a reason. We need a simpler way to interact with the world. So let’s get moving shall we?

Filtering trough content, by peers, by advertising/positioning all work for me because it allows growth. You prioritize, specialise, become remarkable in your field and grow. But filtering trough interface is just a poor option given the choice of ‘fixing the interface and re-position’ or ‘make our software inaccessible to but the most enlighted’ on so many levels. The problem is, if you want to continue the maya comparison, is that SL is a social platform, and the essence of the entire project is the human factor.

Without that you’d be much better off designing in maya, or listening to music in iTunes, or watching pretty pictures in GTA IV of Flickr. Creation is sharing, not just with likeminded techs and other ’3D artists’ but with a broad community. Inspiration doesn’t come from just navel gazing within one small niche, it’s culture brought to you from a diverse group of people.

So in whatever way you can amplify and facilitate this human factor, you should – and the proposition above has the counter effect, not just on the entry level, but also in the long term. Think of how that would shape a community, how it IS shaping the community.

SL is the “site of deepest engagement”? Great phrase but why limit ourselves to that? Why does it have to be one or the other – dancers OR designers? We can have both, in fact we NEED both – but we should lead each one down a slightly different pathway into SL and realise that they came, and will ultimately stay, for slightly different reasons.

Sorry, that’s fourpence now…i’ll stop….

Does the proposition that SL needs to be all things to all people stand? If it does, then I’m with Eris and you – let’s do up a simpler client. Hey, any improvement is an improvement. But if you’re truly going for the “we’re here for everyone – your grandmother, your kids, your browsing and exploring and experiencing desires” then sure, we need to have a stripped down, elegant, and easy-to-grasp client.

I’d propose however that the purpose and reality are increasingly at odds. Second Life is NOT being used for casual browsing – it’s being used for people who are deeply committed and are spending increasing numbers of hours in world. The community isn’t growing, but average user hours are. Concurrency is growing, but slowly.

And as Giff has pointed out, the mass media approach has moved on to other platforms – casual games, MTV, There.com (or back to There.com), custom apps, 2D worlds, etc.

So, if the masses are moving on, are we trying to lure them back? Or are we instead seeing the rise of Second Life as the “site of deepest engagement” – a place that appeals to and attracts folks who are going far deeper than dancing and hanging out at the beach – artificial intelligence researchers, educators, simulation folks, architects, artists, etc. If so, then you’re looking at a target audience that maybe is willing to overcome the learning curve if the tools keep getting more robust.

And all of this, of course, makes no difference if the grid isn’t stable. I’m taking as a given that if they don’t fix the asset server and improve grid uptime that they’ll never last in the long run.

So…well, I agree with you. I WANT Second Life to be a 3D platform that really DOES connect all of humanity. But Philip’s been going on for a year now about how “the brands came too early, we weren’t ready for a mass influx, and really, it’s schools and business-to-business and collaborative platforms where we’re REALLY at” which doesn’t sound a lot to me like “connecting all of humanity” (at least in the short term) and would imply that we should be building out tool sets for these target audiences rather than worrying about whether your newbie who came in for a peek around can find the “talk button”.

But look. I’m willing to give this a shot. Or pose a question – what does it REALLY take to make a simpler viewer? Let’s say one whose buttons and tools are so simple that they can mostly withstand the many updates and patches that Linden itself releases? Is that possible? How hard is it? Can we create a “newbie viewer” easily or is it monumentally difficult? And what would it take to motivate someone, anyone, to sit down and actually sketch something out?

My tuppence : we need a simpler UI for the casual visitor AND we need a more complex (read: professional) UI for the committed builder/resident/businessperson. In other words stop trying to make one size fit all and realise that there is a natural divide between ‘visitors’ and ‘residents’ and create two separate but complimentary clients to accommodate them – a simple to use browser AND a pro-level creation client.

Reflect that divide in the way we access SL too – free feature-limited access for ‘visitors’ and a subscription-based full-access for ‘residents’. Virtual world usage will naturally divide this way anyway, we should be smart enough to realise that now and plan around it.

Too many of the discussions around SL and other virtual worlds focus on the technical problems and possibilities (Dusan’s blog is a welcome exception to this!) because the discussion, and to a large extent the actual platform itself, is being led by developers. Not surprising for such an emergent platform but not always very helpful either. We’d get nowhere without the codeheads, but very few will have the vision a platform like SL needs. It’s not enough to imagine the technical possibilities of virtual worlds – you have to judge whether anyone will actually want to use those possibilities and what for.

In the end it’s always about the people, not the code.

It’s really as simple as that, the purpose.

- Lack of incentive makes people less willing to learn the interface – when its this complicated, they leave. Apparently for 90% there is no clear ‘gain’ from taking the time and effort to learn about the interface – which to me is perfectly understandable at this point.

- The 3D photoshop (a term coined by Eric Rice) application you get by introducing the features as you posted them, means repositioning second life as exactly that (as written about in the earlier article), and would just shift the ‘niche’ from a ’3D facebook’ to a ’3D deviant art’.

- The market SL addresses benefits from being browser-like. ‘Maya is complicated and still sells is true’, but the obvious difference is Maya is goal oriented, and a focus product for a specific niche, of tech savvy people (how many people inside the ‘mass market’ (early and late majority) will use maya? Again it comes down to SL trying to be everything to everybody.

___

P.S. – A common misconception is to think ‘browser like’ means ‘looks like a browser’ but it’s not. A browser is a great way to navigate trough 2D spaces, but that doesn’t make it true for 3D spaces (anyone who has ever been in an activeworlds based world will know this).

However, every button in a default browser is either task oriented or ubiquitous. The affordances used have become cross language conventions, which has made broad adoption possible very quickly. SL, if it wants to maintain the proposition of being everything to everyone, needs to use these common conventions and affordances to make their interface as intuitive as a browser.

Questioning the sacred cows is a way to circle around the real question – which is purpose.

The received wisdom is that we need to do things like improve the interface because we need to make the platform more widely accessible and remove the barriers to entry for the ‘casual’ explorer.

But what if you take these sacred cows and rip them apart a little.

Hypothetical –

What if instead of simplifying the user interface you made it MORE COMPLICATED? Just asking the question points to the idea that maybe we should be questioning the very assumptions on which all these received orthodoxies are based. What if the masses are all headed somewhere else? What if they’re going to be playing on little Metaplace apps all over the Web? What if they’re going to be addicted to Spore, and setting up little 3D rooms off of their MySpace profiles?

Maybe SL is destined to become increasingly specialized with more complex tools for visualization, simulation, creation, and art because, let’s face it, you can clean up the interface all you want but it doesn’t mean the masses will show up.

Here’s a what if:

- What if instead of cleaning up the buttons you add MORE. Say, embed a sculpty program like Cel’s SculptyPaint. Add MORE stuff to learn, and make it part of the “build tools” – add the ability to make sculpts from within the UI. Enable more complex builds rather than simplify.
- You add prim animations as its own interface.
- What if instead of making the camera and controls easier, you made them HARDER. Include the ability to program deeper camera paths, focus settings maybe, shutter speeds?
- What if you built a deeply detailed particle generation engine within the viewer. With a 100 little buttons and knobs, letting you push particles to their extreme outer limits.

Deepen the interface, make it more complex, (and deal with all the other issues like grid stability which is increasingly a cost of entry and survival issue and not a “feature”) and maybe you end up with a small group of users but they’re people who want to push the limits of simulation, 3D modeling, artificial intelligence, and machinima?

Now, I also totally agree with Digado. Because the interface is designed by someone who would never get a job at Apple. It’s a joke of usability design. (Although, IMHO, so is Maya and it still sells). But should we really be redesigning the interface because we want what’s THERE to be easier to use by the newbie and casual “surfer”…or should we be redesigning it so that it’s useful to those who need more powerful tools so that they can extend and deepen the platform beyond a beach house build or a classroom?

Food for thought, but the orthodoxy I’m questioning is as Giff points out: to what PURPOSE all these proposed changes and improvements?

I say look at SL’s growth rate. You’ve tapped out the number of people willing to put up with the accessibility and usability problems. But I do agree that better UI isn’t a silver bullet. There’s a long list of barriers to usage that doesn’t stop at UI, some around accessibility, technology requirements, cultural attitudes, and of course what should really come first: purpose.

But it is good to question these things!