Crafting an effective new-user experience for Second Life starts long before the user logs in for the first time. The Second Life viewer user-interface is not the most important part of a new user’s story.
Jane’s story involves a number of phases. At every phase, some number of users will drop out, and not be retained to the next phase. Getting each phase right and integrated with its predecessor and successor will minimise that attrition.
The new user experience is an end-to-end, holistic process, where work on any single phase in isolation will not provide large improvements.
Here, then, are the first two phases in Jane’s story.
Awareness
The new user – we’ll call her Jane – first has to be aware of Second Life. Like any other service or product, you don’t become a user if you don’t know it exists.
Something we all forget from time-to-time is that many people haven’t actually even heard of Second Life yet. Many have, and have forgotten even its name.
The first step in Jane’s journey is discovering that Second Life exists, and that it is something that she could participate in, if she chooses.
This is basic brand-awareness, and that comes down to marketing.
Reason
The next step in Jane’s journey is having a reason to try Second Life. Whether that is out of curiousity, or to see or experience something specific, or an invitation or encouragement from a friend.
If Jane has no reason to try Second Life, she won’t.
Additionally, if it isn’t a strong reason, Jane just isn’t going to get to the end of this story.
In order to acquire that reason, Jane needs to know more about Second Life. The odds are that she’s not going to visit the Second Life Web-site prior to this in order to find out what Second Life is and isn’t. That information must be exposed to her some other way.
We’re back at marketing again.
Linden Lab is – forgive me – rubbish at telling its story; the story of Second Life. Almost everything that Jane sees, hears and reads about Second Life will be incorrect, and have little correlation with what she experiences should she get so far as to try it out. Much of it wildly so.
Linden Lab tries to promote particular highlights and (rather less often) to indirectly refute incorrect reporting, but just doesn’t tell any coherent story that puts information about Second Life into perspective, let alone into digestible material that might make someone think “I’ve got to get me some of that!”
That means that the best Jane can hope for if she moves on past this stage is that she’s proceeding with false impressions, and that she is most likely to be confused, frustrated and disappointed on arrival.
For the first two parts of Jane’s story, marketing is critical. Marketing that cannot be said to be effectively happening.
There’s more in Jane’s story, of course. She’s not even signed up yet. In the next part, we’ll follow more of Jane’s story, and continue to compare it with present realities.
(Part two continues Jane’s story)
Ty – “rubbish” is a bit soft and nice from what I would call it… but yes; there’s no narrative; no story. I don’t know where they get their Marketeers, but it might as well be Mouseketeers.
I think it’s going to be difficult to condense all that Second Life is and can be into a marketed “story”, but it can be done.
There’s other platforms out there made up entirely of thousands of different siloed experiences, as varied as the imaginations of their thousands of different developers. Apple’s App Store comes to mind, and Apple managed to condense the story of something so varied and complex into simply “There’s an app for that.”
A lot of people have asked that “Your World, Your Imagination” be brought front and center again. The thing about that is, such a slogan has to be provable if its going to be the selling story.
Using the Apple example, Apple proves “there’s an app for that” in their minute commercial spots. The few apps sorted through in a commercial can actually be found in duplicate when a phone is demo’d or bought.
If Linden Lab were to bring back a mantra like “Your World, Your Imagination”, it’d have to be provable in both all the marketing spots and the first hour of in-world experience. There can’t be huge disconnects between what’s marketed, and what’s reality.
The narrative that seems to have compelled most people I know to come to SecondLife so far is Neuromancer/Snow Crash. If you are a fan of cyberpunk literature then when you hear about SL you mentally fit SL into that narrative in your mind and it’s instantly the coolest thing you’ve ever heard of.
The problem is that most people haven’t read those books or aren’t big fans of them. That doesn’t mean it isn’t compelling, it just means that the unwashed masses don’t read good books.
LL ought to get William Gibson to plan their marketing push, he’d know exactly what to do.
Gibson and Stephenson both, apparently, avoid virtual environments as a rule and are rarely willing to discuss Second Life at all. They don’t care for them, it seems.
Gibson had this to say about his big visit to Second Life:
It’s deserted. It seems like functionally it has to be deserted. If it’s not deserted it crashes. So there’s all this empty, empty architecture. There’s whole cities where there’s only one other person and they don’t even want to get close to you. And when you do succeed in finding a group of other avatars, people aren’t very nice.
Now, I consider that largely a failure of expectation management.
(offtopic That quote from Gibson is pretty impressive, given that he probably didn’t spend weeks and months in SL. It’s a very good analysis of one of the fundamental flaws of SL – one that has been toned down with hardware and software improvements, but still remains true: Anything above 40-ish avatars on a sim will start to deteriorate the experience very quickly. Now 40 avatars sounds like a lot to us, but when you think about the size of a region (256x256m), you realize that that’s a couple of football fields in size, or a whole arena! Now when you think about the (tens of) thousands of people that would fit into an arena of that size, all of a sudden “40″ isn’t that much anymore, is it? /offtopic)
Creating a marketing narrative or story for SL requires both an understanding of what’s actually happening in SL at the moment as well as a strategy as to what image and “use” SL *should* have. Especially the latter seems to be constantly missing: Philip never managed to provide the feeling of overall progress in *one* direction, M Linden tried heading into the business segment and failed horribly and the two interim show-runners (Phil, again, and Bob) obviously never had any intention of providing long term strategies.
I think Rodvik will have to pick a direction in which he wants to take SL, and then pray that it’s the right one (and that the board of directors will let him take that road)…
Without a clear goal, sensible mission statement (furthering humanity? really? Is this a non-profit or a company?) and a general *strategy*, the holistic aspect of designing a user experience will inevitably fail, simply because there is no higher level of coordination to tie into, both in terms of company structure (everybody does their own thing atm) and in terms of short-term goals (which require long-term goals to be derived from)
I’ll be going into some of these other areas in the subsequent part or two. Forgive me not writing the whole thing up in one go, but it has been an exhausting week, so I’m doing it in manageable bits.
And the thing about expectation management is, it needn’t even start with describing Second Life as a Snow Crash-esque metaverse or something “advancing the human condition”. Anyone with an ounce of skepticism wouldn’t take those exactly for face value.
There’s some real down to earth misrepresentations by marketing of what Second Life is that just…plain isn’t the case. It mostly has to do with performance and ease of accomplishing things. Case in point that video that’s been on the main page now for like a year showing Matrix-style samurai fighting and instant clothing and animation swapping. The problem is that if anyone were to ask me “Is Second Life really like that?”, there’s an inevitable answer of “Well…” followed by a laundry list of nuances. Most try Second Life without getting to hear that “Well…” with too high of expectations.
Not to nitpick though because every product and service in history is over embellished when marketed; Sprite is supposed to make me an Olympic athlete and my cellphone is supposed to work on the ocean floor for example. But, obviously over embellishing isn’t working for Second Life. It might not be a luxury Linden Lab is afforded if those that join have expectations way too high.
“Abysmal” would be a good adjective for the recent marketing about SL.
If Jane wishes to lie on a beach or play volleyball with a group of tanned-and-toned avatars, she’s got marketing pitched right to her.
If Jane is, however, a young person who actually goes on Spring Break, not so much. If she’s a creative type, an educator, a business person, an architect, a scientist, a gamer…
But even if Jane is none of these things and actually is a teenage girl with dreams of glamorous hair and beach volleyball, odds are Jane ends up playing The Sims instead.
@bubblesort, the unwashed masses read zilch. But maybe they want to pretend to play volleyball.
Well i knew long about Second Life and until 1 year ago, what i thought about was, just anotther social network!
Only on a forum I was able to realize how Second Life was much more then that, a dedicated forum that showed that Second Life was waht i need, a place where my fantasies could be true.
And luckly on that forum a lot of links anf tutorials to get started on second life has i wanted:
And i dont have a problem telllling that it was a Porno dedicated forum, and that what i was looking was the perfect cybersex engine.
That is what is Second Life, the main cybersex plataform avaiable!
That is all about the Sims franchise, a game that you can turn into your sexual fantasy.
Second life adds real people sharing it!
So we are deviants, those who just knew and enjoy second life for its sexual activity?
Well as more deeper i was in Second Life i found that there where really no limits for what any can do or be, so i start building, start enjoying live music, start joinign groups rather then sex ones!
So yes the perfect cybersex tool but also much more,
And Yes Sex is still the main motiv to bring new people and new people with money to spend!
All the rest is rubish and retarde mentalities!
Internet exists cause of Sex.
If not should would be gone..
Sims exist cause of the amazing modder comunity that allowed it to become an incredible sex engine! (Sims 2 at least).
Ea does not have any mistakes about that, they know what sells!
Lindan labs should not be afraid of the image that some want to give to second life, a perverted sex game!
Cause is that image that is keeping new people to come and stay!
Linden Labs already has at hand a huge marketing taskforce that they don’t make use of – SL bloggers and tweeters. If they could somehow learn to harness this energy to their advantage it could go a long way for them!
I can’t recall the last time I saw any advert for SL that wasn’t that vampire one.
Even I get the idea that you can show different adverts.
If you bother to make them.
Erm hate to admit it but Foneco has a point there. “Your world, your imagination…” is a lovely mantra, but the biz also has to attract those whose imaginations are sparked by pixel perversity. Yep, let them grow and discover the whole range but get them in first and foremost:) Actually the vampyre pitch is a pretty good one – so yes, expand on it.
This is where the OpenSimulator grids shine: They actually *can* articulate a narrative, because that’s why they exist in the first place. Anything from “Show up and chat in a virtual environment” to “Helping soldiers heal from PTSD.”
Smaller grids are more focused and had a better chance at telling their story. The Second Life story is, at this point: “A lot of people were really excited about this in 2007.”
Foneco said:
“Internet exists cause of Sex.
If not should would be gone.”
True wisdom there….seriously. LL could really rake it in with “teh sex” that I kept being asked about during my stint as a LL mentor.
There’s a heck of a lot of money in “Your glands. Your imagination.” More than in fake volleyball, I’d wager.
I stumbled by chance onto something about SL on the web at the end of the hype cycle in 2007. Torley’s vidtuts gave me a clue about what was possible but it was blogs by other Residents that showed there were a large number of people doing lots of different things in SL. For me, a large part of SL continues to exist out on the web, beyond the inworld experience.
I checked out blogs and tutorials for about three weeks before opening an account. That gave me some time to consider what I wanted to do in SL, probably the most difficult intial and continuing part of the experience, in my opinion.
I also learned camera control and a few building tricks before I ever opened an account.
I just wish someone had advised me to spend more time picking a name : ))
Agreed. Nice start.
[...] Tateru Nino offers up a post that starts to examine the new user experience. Leaving aside the fact she’s now gazumped me on two topics I’ve been wanting to blog about; [...]