I started talking about the Second Life new-user experience from the perspective of ‘Jane’, an amalgam of many, fairly ordinary new users. A prototypical example of how users new to Second Life experience it. That’s a story that begins quite some time before they ever log in, and the first part is here.
Now Jane has gotten to the point where she’s aware of Second Life, and has a reason to try it out.
The next step in Jane’s story is the Second Life Web-site.
That’s going to be the front page, and probably also the “What is” page.
There are two problems here. For one, if Jane doesn’t like what she sees, her story ends right here.
For the second, well, the intro video on that “What is” page looks more like a trailer for The Sims series. It’s slick and carefully choreographed, and gives a whole pile of false impressions about Second Life, showing all sorts of things working smoothly that don’t work smoothly in Second Life, or that are just impractical. It may be great machinima, but offers a completely inauthentic experience, and if Jane expects the sort of experience she sees depicted here, she’s going to drop out fairly quickly after logging in.
Most notably, this page that is supposed to tell you about ‘what Second Life is’ doesn’t actually tell you anything about Second Life. If Jane follows the link expecting to find out more about what Second Life is, she’s going to feel a little cheated that the page doesn’t deliver. Jane’s not likely to look at the official blog or forums, and statistically, she’s actually never likely to do so, unless something seriously breaks.
Nevertheless, we’ll assume she makes through to the next stage: Registration.
The registration process has certainly been slimmed down over the years. All Jane needs now is an account name, an email address, a date-of-birth, to set up a security question, and to pick one of a dozen preset avatars to start off with. Oh, and she also must make a legally binding promise that she has read and agreed to somewhat in excess of 30,000 words of legal contracts, terms, and policies before she clicks the Create Account button, most of which are not written in plain-language.
Right.
Actually, registration is a place where Facebook integration could be looked at as a positive thing. With a couple of mouse-clicks, much of the registration information could be pre-filled from a user’s Facebook account (if any), along with a suggested account-name. Registration’s certainly easy, but there doesn’t seem much harm in making it even easier for those that want it – and a number of online services do just that. Any connection to Facebook could be thrown away after that. Even so, streamlining registration at this point isn’t likely to help retention, because … well …
What’s Jane up to now?
She’s signed up for an account on Second Life, about which she knows nearly nothing – and much of what she thinks she knows is probably wrong. Until she got to the download page – after registering – she was likely unable to readily discover whether her computer would be able to run the Second Life viewer. That’s the first page on which any system requirements are linked to.
Actually, she might still not know. Not many people know what’s inside their computer cases. Those of us who do and are able to compare are a rarity.
She’s preparing to log in for the first time and still doesn’t know what a Linden is, or a Linden Dollar for that matter, or where/how to get help. She might or might not recognise the name “Linden Lab” even.
That’s the second part of Jane’s story as a new Second Life user. Soon, we’ll move on to the last part.
Totally agree about that intro video. In my personal experiences it does more damage than good when I’m introducing Second Life to someone else and their expectations are set too high by something like that. I usually show friends I’m inviting the “Man vs. Second Life” video on YouTube, because then at least I’m explaining how Second Life is BETTER than something charmingly comedic rather than explaining why Second Life runs very little like what’s on the Second Life frontpage.
The registration page I never found much wrong with the past few years. Now that those last names are gone though, I can recognize an experience improvement since I can recall quite a few people asking me “Are these all the last names I can choose from?” And I respond explaining how to refresh the page and get more…etc. Probably for the best they removed that however minor.
I also noticed post-registration there’s follow-up emails nowadays. Dunno how long that’s been around. If a user registers and never logs in, an e-mail meant to encourage and assist is sent. Not sure what the follow-up patterns of automated email are beyond that.
Just a side note here: “Any connection to Facebook could be thrown away after that”.
A noble thought, but pragmatically, you can rest assured that is just not going to happen. A service like Facebook will not allow such information to be thrown away.
This is one reason many people are wary about such integration. There is no way to sever connections once made in such systems, and as Facebook’s ever-more-revealing policies and Google Buzz’s accidental/poorly-thought-out leak proved, they *will* at some point be used for something you didn’t agree to originally.
@Tali
What Tateru mentioned was authenticating with Facebook. It’s not uncommon nowadays for sites to let you authenticate with Facebook, Twitter, Google (Gmail/YouTube), etc. This doesn’t involve any extra sharing of information with Facebook, infact you’d be permitting information exchange in the opposite direction by allowing information you’ve already given Facebook to be provided to Second Life; relevant in this situation name and birthdate.
The benefit is that it’d let new users avoid storing a password in yet another place, with small bonuses of avoiding having to fill out a couple of signup fields and solving CAPTCHA. Pretty much like signing up to Yelp via the Facebook option basically.
Additionally, you’re able to revoke access to any service or client that accesses your Facebook account whenever you please. Same goes for every OAuth2 provider like Twitter and Google.
There’s really not much to it. There’s no parasitic connection where Facebook can pull info out of Second Life from you, and Second Life can’t do things like start posting to your Wall without your consent.
While it is true that using Facebook credentials to log in doesn’t automatically enable Facebook to read SL information, I would be much surprised if they didn’t log when they handed off information to other sites, and attempted to datamine, say, the return URLs.
You are handing information about your behavior to Facebook, and it is their stated business model to aggregate and publish exactly such information. Considering what they are doing with the “Like” and “Connect” buttons, I don’t think it is paranoid to assume that they will use any access to their servers to scrape all the information they can.
Anyway, this is rather tangential to the original topic of the post.
I tried several times to dip into Second Life and it never really filled a need I had. Avatar-based gaming and world construction was actually done better and more enjoyably by Minecraft.
We use a company-wide IM called Sametime which offers virtual meetings, attending real meetings remotely, screen sharing and stuff. It would be hard to see how using avatars in a virtual environment (that probably wouldn’t work well on our old XP laptops) would at all enhance the process.
Second Life was the answer to all those cyberspace daydreams of the 80s and 90s, but by the time Linden Labs made the daydream real, computing had gotten far more ubiquitous. We don’t need avatars to experience cyberspace for us when we’re ever more deeply embedded in it ourselves.
SL has just become dated and almost irrelevant. You skip over Jane ever hearing about it in a non-bizarre way like the story I saw on some news program about one guy suing another guy for stealing his virtual sex toy creations. This is the kind of thing LL must cringe to see. You also skip over Jane having a need that SL could answer.
These are the very things I’d love to learn.
Over the weekend, I logged in to check out an in-world site that makes custom vehicles. I decided to do a bit of laggy driving afterward, and before I knew it, I’d met and nearly run over a “Jane” standing in the middle of the road. She’s a month old.
She had a somewhat customized avatar, told me she’d heard about SL from a friend, and we chatted (this is a simulation of the actual chat, not a log):
Jane: “Do you have a house?”
Iggy: “No. I have a floating office because my university left SL. I have a little 512 where I can rezz things and hold office hours.”
Jane: “Oh…well, I have a house!”
Iggy: “Cool. Where do you live?”
Jane: “Um, no where yet.” (A prefab house is in her inventory)
Iggy: “Oh, mainland prices are cheap now and tier runs…”
Jane: “I have no money.”
I’d expected some begging to follow, so off I went on my fake motorcycle (purchased in-world of course).
So how does Jane become part of SL’s economy without selling her pixelated body or “working” for a few cents an hour?
LL has a lot of empty land but the Linden Home program is just not enough for the Janes of SL, I guess, to go premium.
It’s embarrassing and difficult to be put in the position of explaining to a prospective client that SL doesn’t perform in the way it’s portrayed on the website. It doesn’t happen often, but some turn up with plans that then require me to talk about scripted solutions or workarounds for things that they believe are built in. I feel the worst in cases when they lose trust in me — after all, it’s on the website — and go on to shop for another developer. I know the only developers they’re going to find who will give them the answer they expect is going to rip them off.
In the same vein, I always felt those CSI shows did us a disservice.
Part 2: Agree, again. Nice analysis.
Whenever I come across a new SL resident I say ‘hello’ and if I can strike up a conversation, and if the conversation goes on long enough I ask “how did you discover SL? How are you doing?” Based on this profoundly flawed sample, my estimate of the number of Janes in SL — people whose initial experience Tateru describes — is ZERO. There are no Janes. EVERY new resident I talk to says they’re here because friends told them about it, and if they’re doing pretty well, it’s because friends are helping them.
@Tali
Here’s exactly what’s passed during authentication via OAuth2: http://developers.facebook.com/docs/authentication/
More about OAuth2 here: http://wiki.oauth.net/w/page/25236487/OAuth-2
Technical and irrelevant right now since Second Life doesn’t use such things, but it’d take any worries off the table about what might happen in such an implementation. There’s no handing off of any account information other than what you permit Facebook to give a service like Second Life; nothing at all in the way of Second Life being able to provide Facebook with account information.
@Ignatius
Yeah that is a problem isn’t it? Most people I’ve brought into Second Life almost immediately run into a barrier where they need L$ for something they want. I have two options at that point: 1. Buy them whatever they want despite the high chance they’re not going to stick around. 2. Point them to a freebie warehouse.
Perhaps Linden Lab should be the one solving that particular issue. How about a one time new user 500L stipend upon successfully verifying age via some personally identifiable route (SSN, Driver’s ID)? Or adding a credit card or pay pal? Something personally identifiable and not easy or possible to game across alt accounts without using multiple identities (identity theft probably not worth 500L).
Or maybe whatever orientation area still exists if any, there should be a “freebie warehouse” of sorts that all creators can choose to submit things to. Seems like it’d be win-win: free stuff for new users and potential free exposure by store owners to every new user.
@Pat
Doesn’t that just mean all or most of the ‘Janes’, the ones that arrived with no guidance, probably quit before someone like you ever got a chance to meet them? Such a thought isn’t in contrast with the high churn rate Second Life has had for awhile now.
Its a problem if the only new users you’re seeing are the ones that were helped by their friends. Second Life has to be an experience where more than the early adopters from years yore can survive alone. We’re in an era of Second Life where its fairly mature software thats had its heyday of news cycle newness despite issues, all the early adopters types are scoping other things so Linden Lab doesn’t have the benefit of that crowd anymore I imagine.
@Ezra
Yes indeed, a sample of newbies met on the street undersamples people who remained only a short time, and does not represent a simple random sample of people who signed up.
I would fairly agree with most of what Tateru would say, so far. SL spent a LOT of money making machinima about the small parts of the SL experience, like shopping, games and exploring. They decided to put their best foot forward, and it’s not really a bad thing. It just a TYPICAL marketing thing to do, and we know that most marketing strategies are downright dishonest.
@Kim Anubis: On the contrary, I thought CSI: NY’s stint in SL was a great thing. Too bad it was short. I looked forward to having something like that (detective roleplay) inworld for a long time.
I was once a Jane, now I move into writing stories about everything that we can do, see, and meet in SL. I didn’t really have a “need”, perse, as what Tipa would suggest, but I would soon feel a strong sense of self with my avatar.
I learned and stayed because of places like the NCI. I was never an active participant at the NCI, but it was an important place for me as a new user then. Just talking to people whoa re like me and at the same time being genuinely helped by other people old into this virtual world was what made me stay. NCI taught me more possibilities about SL, and the experience was still amazing for me, but at the same time it was honest. I never had any false impression of SL as a great game or anything.
What Jane would need to see is what I have found out about SL myself: after experiencing something similar to the NCI as a noob, you definitely need to find a LOT of those things that will pique your interest and make you stay inworld a day longer on your own. Most of the things I love about SL like the arts, writing, fashion, communities and places, are mostly because I took time to discover these myself. I still find something new to be fascinated on, places that still manage to thrive despite the technical problems and all.
@Ezra, that 500L “seed money” would be a great idea if coupled to age verification (though I understand that is easily scammed).
Otherwise, what a wonderful gold-farm opportunity
Residents would use some, then see an item they really, really want with only 200 more Linden Dollars and reach for a credit card.
Tateru -
I can only speak for myself but for ME – having mentors made SL appealing and desirable and fun. Quite honestly – for over TWO YEARS I never mastered the viewer. And it didn’t mater all that much to me. I was BUILDING in SLE before I knew about changing my draw rate. I happen to LIKE v2, which is MUCH more intuitive for me than v1.23 was.
As for my experiences with hearing about SL for the first time, and how I survived my initial logon, and the first few weeks where my dreadfully-underpowered machine crashed and burned repeatedly – I blogged it.
Here is the true beginning – when I first heard of SL: http://ahuva18.wordpress.com/2008/06/19/how-it-all-began/
Here is what happened when I actually finally created an avatar: http://dwellonit.taterunino.net/2011/03/27/janes-story-assembling-an-ideal-second-life-new-user-experience-part-two/
“@Kim Anubis: On the contrary, I thought CSI: NY’s stint in SL was a great thing. Too bad it was short. I looked forward to having something like that (detective roleplay) inworld for a long time.”
One of the things that project did that was very cool was offer an SL experience that was built specifically for new users in a way designed to reduce or dodge the SL learning curve. SL can be made much more immediately useful to new users with a build like this. I’m also aware that some people enjoyed the inworld build lot.
What I was referring to was the unrealistic expectations about SL the machinima in the TV show itself fostered, such as a scene which appeared to have hundreds of avatars at an event in a very small space. This sort of thing caused headaches for those of us who had to later explain to prospective clients that you couldn’t really do it, that it was special effects. I don’t know how many new Residents signed up after seeing the show and expected SL be as it was portrayed, to be disappointed to some degree.
No slam intended on the build by ESC, or the fact that SL appeared on a popular show, or on the built itself … Those are all things to be commended.
@Kim Anubis and @Isadora Fiddlesticks – really not on this topic, but more about shows/media that portray SLwell – Peter May’s book Virtually Dead gets a lot RIGHT about SL. http://www.amazon.com/Virtually-Dead-Peter-May/dp/1590587081
and my bad before – i posted the wrong link to my blog (obviously) up above – here is what happened when i DID finally create an avatar: grayness and confusion, because my machine couldn’t handle it – http://ahuva18.wordpress.com/2008/06/26/plunging-in/
CSI isn’t the only TV show which used Second Life. I see a few people around who came into SL on the back of a show called Gossip Girls
Looking at other recent posts, the obvious problem is that of legal departments who don’t realise something is officially authorised.
It’s possible that, in the USA at least, there’s nothing we will be able to lawfully use in our lifetimes.
Oh well, it was fun playing detective in NY. While it wasn’t entirely realistic in terms of what SL can really do, the episodes were nicely done. ESC were really talented and hardworking people in the sense that they were creative enough to integrate other techniques to make it possible for them to make those scenes.
I remember the Gossip Girl sim too…it was sad SL lost that too. It was fairly active. I’m not sure if The L Word still has a presence in SL though. Lots of TV shows before had an SL presence.
[...] has blogged her thoughts. Tateru Nino has blogged numerous times(actually, I even commented on one of them). Lately the conversation has focused in particular on Orientation Island, Help Islands and the [...]