The user experience depicted in yesterday's video illustrated that there is a hierarchy of needs when it comes to Second Life. Before someone can get to fast, easy and fun they need to be able to move, see and interact.
Although Orientation Island and the mentor program were kludgy and unsophisticated training mechanisms, they were certainly better than nothing. Although starting off a newcomer in an area that matches their interest is a great idea (IMHO), it is useless without fundamental instruction in the abc's of functioning in the world.
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I agree with you, and in fact my company Involve was contracted to do just that. Do to internal LL problems the work we did which took the orientation experience and boiled it down to something a new user could learn well in 12 minutes, will most likely never see the light of day.
Sometimes I wonder how a ship without a rudder ever gets where its going
What I find disheartening is that this basically represents the peak of Linden Lab's work on new user experience, summing all the knowledge, feedback, statistics, the present capabilities of the technology, comparisons with other services... and this is the best they can do? The Lab's best effort?
You are so right, Botgirl. Oh, I'm soooo tempted to start a rant here, but I'll just say that if you need help and guideance in SL, you have to "rely on the kindness of strangers."
Interesting. About two or three weeks ago I created my first alt and went through an orientation process that was a clean, white, curvy minimalist version of the orientation I'd done in 2006, complete with the parrot. I also learnt to walk, sit, cam around some fish and fly (in a space with enough room for me and my camera). It was a tad short and a bit too simple but it was an orientation.
And now they've abandoned that to dump new users into whichever location in the destination guide they thought looked good? Great way to reward communities or single creators with high quality builds - flood them with newbies who don't even know how to walk!
Does these mean Sexton Shepherd's NEMO builds are going to become the new newbie dumping ground for steampunk, given his comes top of the destination guide section and appears on the front page sometimes?
What's a good design to introduce experienced SL users into an immersive experience, is not a good design to dump newbies into. The lab should NOT have done this before introducing a newbie viewer skin or (working) HUD/client-side orientation to replace the job the orientation island was doing.
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