Peering Inside: Disorienting experiences

by Tateru Nino Apr 21st 2008 at 10:30AM

Filed under: Opinion, Second Life, Virtual worlds, Peering Inside

Over the weekend, I had the opportunity to introduce a friend to Second Life. We'll call her Susan. That meant a run through the current orientation system. The whole process was an eye-opener, especially the part where Susan tried to beat me to death with her keyboard.

The last time I saw a Linden Lab orientation island it was one of the old ones (2005/2006). The new ones, though (2007/2008) - well, it's surprising that the retention is as high as ten percent.

The absolute highlight of the experience was a nude avatar by the name of Adam Neal, who ran around in circles for ten minutes or so yelling "ADAM NEAL CANNOT BE STOPPED!" -- no, really. That was one of the good bits, actually. The rest was worse.

This particular model of orientation island is laid out on several sections, and new users get a HUD object that triggers on nearby objects and places, presenting the new user with a succession of tasks and instructions. The orientation HUD presents two types of task: Required tasks, and optional tasks.

Oh, if only that actually worked.

Susan rapidly found that the HUD was largely broken. The HUD would consistently refuse to advance through required tasks. You could start over easily enough (if you weren't too frustrated to check your surroundings for the tiny reset sign). You could also get shoved into another section by a clumsy user, essentially causing the HUD to throw away whatever lesson you were on, and start something different.

I asked her how she felt about the HUD tasks. She glared at me and tapped the screen, 'Look at this. It's a required task. "Click the flashing arrow to continue", so."

She clicked. The arrow disappeared. Nothing more happened.

'So, what do I do now?', she asked me, 'Can I actually get into SL-proper from here now? Because, it won't let me complete orientation.'

'Yes, unless they've done something peculiar with the sim code you can still get through, HUD or no HUD.'

She arched an eyebrow at me, 'How would I know that? This is not what it says.'

In less than a minute, another stumbling block.

'Where is the Chat button?' she asked, as I returned with coffee, 'I don't see it here anywhere.'

I leaned over and looked at the screen. Sure enough, the HUD referred to the 'old school' user-interface, rather than the current one. I explained this.

'So, you're telling me that in all the time since the user-interface was updated not... wait. How many people work at Linden Lab?'

'Supposed to be about 250 or so at the moment.'

'So, out of those 250, not one single person was remotely interested enough in new users and what they were doing to update the primary orientation tool so that it wouldn't drive people crazy?' she added some muttered imprecations.

Adam Neal made his grand entrance at this point. Long limbed, and bare-assed, he ran circles around the other new users smoothly and in high style. "ADAM NEAL CANNOT BE STOPPED!" he proclaimed in all-caps.

Momentarily, he seemed to be the clean-limbed Greek hero of orientation, naked, powerful and athletic in his newbie skin and flowing mane of hair, like some digital Achilles or Odysseus. Moreover, he truly seemed unstoppable -- unlike the orientation system itself, which was quite fallible by comparison.

We had to laugh at this point. That might have been the only thing that broke enough tension for Susan to make it the rest of the way.

By our tally, two thirds of the HUD tasks simply didn't function, either because the HUD itself didn't do what it was supposed to when it was supposed to, or some matching facility on the island itself didn't itself operate. In three places it directed the user to UI elements that had moved or been renamed and no longer matched the descriptions.

Finally, Susan said 'Please. Just help me get out of here.'

The exit sign offered her a landmark to the Nova Albion Infohub at Miramare - Infohubs largely doubling as mainland welcome areas.

Situated on the border of four simulators, where a new user will experience unexpected motion-prediction during their first border crossing, the area is also surrounded by some narrow, deep canals that are easy to fall into (no guard rails or barriers). Things that experienced users don't much think about.

A few moments later, Susan was at the bottom of a canal.

Flying, however, was one of the lessons that she had successfully completed (despite the flight lesson area apparently not being large enough for both her and her camera, so she was unable to see where she was going for the majority of it).

Susan reached for the Fly button, and hoisted herself out, though without the studied precision of a more experienced user, she flew (unawares) across the sim border - and motion-prediction took her far from her goal.

She attempted to return, and the border crossing again made her overshoot the mark. She tried twice more before attempting to beat me up with the keyboard and logging out.

'How,' she asked me, 'does anyone get through this at all? I've never had trouble with the tutorial or orientation for anything else. If I didn't have a specific reason to be in there, I'd be uninstalling right now.'

I had no answer for her, because I was asking myself that very same question.

Susan's smart and has had a ton of experience with virtual worlds, and game-worlds both, and the process really balked her. I'm certain that the orientation HUD usually behaves better than that (despite it being out-of-date), though bear in mind that the users we hear from are the ones who ended up staying anyway. Presumably they're the ones that things worked for rather better than this particular ordeal.

The important thing is the experience she had. Essentially, it was wretched, and discouraging -- even for me, just looking over her shoulder, and there seemed to be many avoidable issues.

So ... why weren't they avoided? Unlike Adam Neal, it seems many newbies can be stopped.

Tags: adam-neal, featured, linden-lab, miramare, newbies, nova-albion, opinion, orientation-island, peering-inside, second-life, second-life-orientation, virtual-worlds

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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 2)

Skate Foss said on 7:07PM 4-21-2008

As a Mentor, I am totally agree with you. I am sorry you did not see a Mentor on the OI you were on. When I am approached by new residents with those same problems I always tell them to disregard the HUD and just try each task at the 4 different parts of the Island. Whats worse are the many non-English speaking new residents who cannot be helped when same lanquage speaking Mentors cannot be found.
Several months ago, Linden Labs rolled out an impressive new set of Orientation Islands, Mentors were asked to seed the Islands and observe the user experience. Overall the UI of the Islands were easy to navigate and very educational. Avatars were forced to follow a set route and at the end were given the choice of staying in a sandbox to learn building skills or leave to go to the Mainland.
Sadly, those Islands were wiped.
As with the questionably designed Dazzle Viewer, Linden Labs does not seem to pay attention to the comments and critics of the users. Isn't the Patient and Customer always right?

Nock Forager said on 12:29AM 4-22-2008

I recently gathered informations about orientation provided by 3rd parties. ( http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Orientation_Areas ). Many of them are "one-way", "mission clear" type. (FYI, "new set" that you mentioned is former shot of Meltingdots orientation).

Each orientation has pros and cons. I want discuss about it and what we should be at the wiki page.

Tateru Nino said on 4:33AM 4-22-2008

Susan says, "I don't know how much help a single mentor could have been. There were at least 20 people trying to get threough orientation when I was."

There might even have been a mentor there, but honestly, almost nobody who gets through orientation ever sees one.

TigroSpottystripes Katsu said on 11:37AM 4-21-2008

one would think the Ls would be testing the orientation island(s?) systems often enough to pick up those glitches :/

Prokofy Neva said on 12:08PM 4-21-2008

Despite all the Lindens who work on this, they remain resolutely, staunchly, stubbornly opposed to making any corrections to this insanity.

The solution here is to remove the HUD device completely. It's just too prone to bugs and too hard to handle. Orientation has to be far simplified, and remove silly things like "learn how to drive a vehicle" which nobody wants to do, nor can do, realistically, in SL, given the sim seam problem, until they are far more experienced.

People care about appearance, sometimes obsessively worrying about looking newbish -- make it dead simple for them to chose a look that goes on them completely with one click, again, until they can sort out.

Teach them how to walk, get and keep notecards, send inventory, send an IM, use search, make a friend. I personally think those are the 6 most important things that get them to everything else.

I totally agree about Nova Albion. The Lindens are artificially pumping newbies to it now, by adding an additional teleport board to press on at the end of the tutorial. That's forcing newbies to go to an area they find aesthetic or compelling or near their new 1950s condos they want to hawk in their DPW sim, who the hell knows.

On their own, when they were only one of the random assignments of the random script out of the help island (which should be changed to serial instead of random, as it spits up and lands newbies 100 times on just one place and then doesn't load balance), Nova Albion and Miramare did not retain newbies. They didn't come back to it after being dumped there, as it was cold and unattractive and uninteresting in terms of content -- newbies are forcibly set home, but unless they like an infohub, they don't keep coming back. So the Lindens artificially pumped up the LEAST trafficked of the resident-made infohubs for reasons that seem to have to do with their FIC friends having made this infohub.

It's just insane, all of this. The solution to fixing the welcome area/orientation madness is to simplify it down to the very very basics, remove all the junk like freebies and feting, and have ad boards that people can buy, combined with some sponsored newbie helpers, that people can select on their own to travel to and learn skills by doing and finding real friends instead of first getting trapped under a HUD in a stupid vehicle that goes nowhere, then trapped at the bottom of a canal.

Loki said on 12:15PM 4-21-2008

The Orientation Islands are designed to keep population of SL down, so grid performance stays at almost tolerable.

I remember by orientation day back in 2005 on that lil island, with the parrot. within 15 mins i was on the main grid exploring with the basics, how has it gotten so complicated?

With all the funky new features its easy to make things more complicated than they need to be. I started using super vendors that had a central server and multipal items with funky fading effects to sell my stuff. As time went by the buggier the grid got and more and more customers complained of not getting what they paid for.... i decided then to go back to the days of individual boxes on a wall and do away with the fancy scripted vendors. Sales are much healthier now.

The orientation needs to be simplified LOTS, never mind the funky huds, and over the top funky games.

Morgan Northmead said on 4:34PM 4-21-2008

Oh, yes, this situation is sad. I have been trying to help other professors in my university enter the Second Life(R) world (hereafter referred to as "SL"). This usually requires that I orient them personally, since the Linden-based SL orientation experience is inevitably frustrating and confusing. I have found two of the non-Linden orientation sites to be better. Circuit City actually has a reasonable orientation area. There is also "Avatar Island".

In general, I have found that the best way to get new users to stay is to have another human being essentially shepherd them through the first few weeks. It seems to take at least three weeks for new users to lose their "newbie look" and begin to function independently. Even after several months, the risk of doing something discouraging, such as derezzing a wall of one's house, persists.

Clearly, there is a need to create a more user-friendly SL experience that does not seem to constantly punish people for being new.

Marianne McCann said on 12:09PM 4-21-2008

I've had to help other friends get out of that Orientation island as well. Sounds like it was a good idea, but pooly executed and maintained. Definitely not one that'll make folks want to come back!

I have to say, too, that I agree on focusing on "how to walk, get and keep notecards, send inventory, send an IM, use search, make a friend" -- at the least, these are skills that not only help a newbie, but also help the SL community as a whole. I might also include "rez a cube" in there somewhere.

Eloise said on 1:32PM 4-21-2008

To Prok's list I'd add send and take a tp offer - but walking, talking, flying perhaps, tping, searching, shopping, changing clothes and hair, making friends cover most of "need to know" early.

It's what we teach new students, pulling them out of OI asap so they can get some face-to-face time. We don't teach all of those skills at once, and for students we add uploading textures, rezzing prims, adding textures, notecards and scripts to prims so they can make displays quickly (we give them the scripts and L$ for those bits). In terms of retention - we basically keep 100% for the duration of the course. We keep more than 10% who use SL for other things for more than a month, so we probably do something better than OI manages.

I understand why LL don't want to staff OIs and HIs continuously, but they have hundreds of educators in world, you might have thought some of the skills from there would be used. Ironically, all the educators I know have abandoned OI and HI and do it themselves, on either a big scale, or a per-class scale. It's got to say something about the perceived quality that LL should listen to when teachers choose to do extra work than use existing resources.

Ari Blackthorne said on 2:53PM 4-21-2008

Cripes - I'm with Loki and Prok on this.

I remember the old little island with a parrot. I had to create my first alt for a build test I needed him for. So I got to see what was up.

YIKES!
I have been in SL sinc e2006 and *I* had trouble getting out of Orientation Island! I am *not* kidding you.

Finally just friended myself and offered a tp out - and poof - goodbye forever Orientation island! I can only say - "Wholely crap"! LOL

TigroSpottystripes Katsu said on 4:46PM 4-21-2008

is there a mirror of the the current OI accessible from the rest of the grid? (I mean, the current one doesn't allow one to teleport in from outside, right? or have they changed this?)

Tateru Nino said on 10:06PM 4-21-2008

I am told one of them might be unlocked to external visitors -- but I've not seen it. Last I looked, the public orientation island was a mirror of the old one.

Joonie said on 6:46PM 4-21-2008

I remember that parrot, too. LOL! I don't know why, but I didn't have any probs with the UI back then. I went from Orientation Island to Help Island....then flew off of help island to one of the nearby ones that I could fly to.

I loved it! Made a ton of mistakes but that's how I learn.

As far as how to change clothes and wear hair, etc. some of my best friends inworld are avis I met when first starting out and asking questions of them. And people I in turn helped when I saw a noob trying to open an object. That kind of thing, for me anyway, helped build community.

Sorry your friend had such a miserable time. I just don't get why it's so much more difficult now.

Orange Montagne said on 1:03AM 4-22-2008

Imagine sending a friend to sign up for SL and what they actually experience. When I joined in 2005 orientation was a nice little stroll down the hill where you talked to the parrot and then learned to fly. Now, I'm not even sure either how to leave that sprawling complex or handle the icon-laden HUD.

How it got this bad is very puzzling. If the purpose is to keep people OUT then I guess it's not accomplishing that either.

Either way, it's something we would like to see get better as the de-facto salespersons for this virtual world.

-MRO

Tateru Nino said on 1:09AM 4-22-2008

Interestingly, how it got this way was from experiment and measurement. This orientation scheme at that time had statistically low, but still significant gains over the earlier model.

Maybe it has been adjusted since then, or underlying systems are more fragile now.

TigroSpottystripes Katsu said on 2:42AM 4-22-2008

or perhaps the way the measuraments were done aren't acurate at all

Tateru Nino said on 3:04AM 4-22-2008

Perhaps a disparity between what we think is an important measure and what Linden Lab does. It can't reasonably be said that SL users and LL have the same basic goals, I don't think. I'm not even sure that the two sides know what each-other's goals are.

Corcosman Voom said on 7:49PM 4-22-2008

To the list of basic skills I would add camera control - learning how to use Alt+left mouse button.

I've run into many people that have been in world for weeks and even months that did not know how much easier life is when you control the camera.

And perhaps, for Adam Neal and his ilk, how to use Mute.