Linden Lab Launches New First Hour Experience: Feels Like Being in an Apple Store Selling Microsoft Products

After a couple years of development, Linden Lab is unveiling its revamped "first hour" user experience today. Now after new Residents create an account, they'll get an updated suite of base avatars to choose from, then get sent to two new isles accessible only to noobs and Lindens: Welcome Island and Discovery Island. The Lindens were nice enough to give me an advance look last night.

My quick take: It's a definite improvement to the existing on-ramp experience, and should improve user retention rates to some degree. As you would expect from a Linden executive team counting veterans of design-centric companies like Adobe, TiVo, and Pixar, it's a sleek and streamlined presentation. At the same time, I think it still doesn't address many of the fundamental frictions noobs have with Second Life, and the overall result is a beautiful frame added around those more vexing UI issues. Or to put it another way: It feels like walking into an Apple Store that's selling Microsoft products.

Maybe I'm being overly skeptical. Let me show some highlights from the experience, and you can judge the results for yourself:

The Welcome Island is a series of sphere-shaped instructional rooms connected by a narrow pathway; this pretty much insures the user will never feel lost or confused about what to do next.  That's a big improvement. The original Orientation Island very much looked like a tropical island, and it wasn't uncommon for noobs to fall off the trail and wander into the ocean. However, some traces of the early Island still remain in the new user experience, like bizarre cultural artifacts of a lost time. Since 2003, Lindens have used an object resembling a talking parrot to teach noobs how to text chat. The parrot has migrated over to the new orientation, but given the setting, he sorta looks like he's been kidnapped by aliens:

There's a number of human bots with basic chat functions, as here. Maybe they'd serve better at this point than poor old Polly? Anyway, onward:

In my experience, teaching a new user how to zoom the camera on a specific object has been the most frustrating part of an SL tutorial, requiring them to do three things simultaneously. (It's roughly as aggravating as teaching someone to drive stick shift.) The new user experience has not changed the focus UI. You still need to hold the Alt key down while also holding the left mouse button down while also moving your mouse in the desired direction within a three dimensional axis. However, now at least you have some pretty fish to practice zooming on:

After passing through the teaching nodes for basic avatar movement and interaction, the new user has the option of proceeding to Discovery Island, an attractive, open air artificial island with video screens arranged around the edges:

The videos continue the teaching process (often narrated by the every-enthusiastic Torley Linden) -- how to search for content, how to use voice chat and IM, and so on. (I started one video on buying a Premium account, then wandered over to a communication tutorial video, and wound up with both videos playing at the same time.) As you can see from the screencap below, the tutorials get pretty involved, and it's doubtful new users will retain much of the firehose of information thrown at them:

PR guy Pete Linden tells me that in closed trials, this new first hour experience has significantly improved retention and usage rates, and I believe him. I tried this new onboarding without the help of Linden assistants who'd presumably be hanging around to offer advice. In any case, my opinion is not what counts -- it's Second Life's concurrency and monthly unique user rates that matter. Now that this new first hour experience is up, I'll be watching to see where those numbers go. My guess is we'll see a small but not insignificant increase in both. But from my view, big adoption numbers will require a few more iterations.

Comments

[Ann Otoole]

Anything that helps is good. We need to see what this discovery island is promoting though. Might be some Fair Trade issues with LL promoting select businesses. Is anyone allowed there or must we make new alts to see?

[Beyers Sellers]

Come to Metanomics today at noon PT to hear Tom Hale talk about his announcement (https://blogs.secondlife.com/community/features/blog/2010/03/31/unveiling-an-improved-new-resident-experience). You can ask questions and provide comments inworld or via the web. See http://metanomics.net for more info.

[Kerria Seabrooke]

Thanks so much for your thoughtful post, this is really great feedback. Our team at ILL Clan along with the Linden team spent long hours producing this experience as one of the first steps to create an improved first user experience. While you may have some reservations - it sounds like the overall experience was a positive one.

[Arcadia Codesmith]

I'll be disappointed if Discovery Island DOESN'T nudge users towards established, high-quality, newbie-friendly venues. Favoritism be hanged; let them learn to swim before they're tossed into the shark tank.

[Bugs Larnia]

Oh my god.... what a dreadful lab-like place... I have seen so many good Community Gateways with real PEOPLE guiding new folk into SL.

This will be a haven for vampires who will create a new account and bite everyone who comes through, and advertisers who pass out LMs (it's proven new folk click yes on almost anything) and whisk people away before they even have a chance to learn....

They can do this since LL does not have ANY personnel monitoring these places....

[Benjamin Brebenfarm]

"I think it still doesn't address many of the fundamental frictions noobs have with Second Life" - What kind of fundamental frictions specifically?

[zam]

Pretty, and better than the Jungle Island, but still the wrong way to market and gain audience.

I'd be nice if someone at LL had 20 years of Madison Ave. and not 2 years of IT plus an MBA.

[Marianne McCann]

Better than what was but I find myself being disturbed by one thing: there is no mention at all that one can build. Not even the slightest mention of building whatsoever. I sense this will be a continuing trend, and one that concerns me,

[Bettina Tizzy]

@Marianne - Really? Eeek?

[soror nishi]

I guess if we all get interested enough to create an alt to go see...then the numbers will increase.......

...but I am happy at least that LL is not just repainting the front door (new viewer) but also refurbishing the lobby...

[Reizo Kamachi]

I think a major issue still needs to be addressed: The default walk animation.
When I first entered Second Life in 2005, that was the first thing I noticed as a gamer. The walked looked horrible, and I assumed the rest of SL walked the same way.

I hope that has been fixed with the new starting avatars, maybe?

[FlipperPA Peregrine]

While a big improvement, I think it still fails to address the number one problem with retention, as does the new viewer: how do you get the new user introduced to someone in a community of a common interest of theirs? The retention of the L-Word islands, and observations of willingness of established Residents to hand-hold new Resis on display there still hasn't been leveraged.

Regards,

-Flip

[Raul Xaron]

So I created an alt to check this out. Being a builder, I was curious about the construction of the build, and looked at it in the edit tool. The surprise revelation: It's built of megaprims! The sculpties forming the gently curving walls show Zwagoth Klaar as creator. Unless they contracted Zwagoth to do the build (exceedingly unlikely), it means they're finally relying on the megaprim hack just like everyone else started doing ages ago.

LL, if it's good enough for orientation island, it's good enough to be a built in feature.

[Lalo Telling]

So... will the existing Welcome Areas be discontinued, and perhaps removed? I, for one, would not mourn the loss of Ahern WA.

(The decommissioned WA that still exists in Plum, however, should be retained for historical purposes.)

[Corcosman Voom]

From T. Linden's SL blog post today:

"Discovery Island is like a Second Life exposition where we encourage users to explore a wide range of interesting starter experiences available to them."

I would be interested in anything you can tell us about this, Hamlet.

[Damien Fate]

You can visit the public versions of Welcome Island an Discovery island :)

http://slurl.com/secondlife/Welcome%20Island%20Public3/89/122/34

http://slurl.com/secondlife/SL%20DiscoveryIsland%20Public3/128/114/34

[Fogwoman Gray]

@Marianne - this has been my concern for some time. New mgmt does not seem to understand that what makes SL unique is the build tools. Abandon that and you can go lots of other places that do 3D chat better and with less lag :)

[LittleLostLinden]

This island isn't going to help much.

What would help would be to make the graphics work on video cards.

I have a nice HD5850 with quad core Q6600 and SL still runs like a turkey caught in a moose trap.

Fix that graphics engine Linden Peoples!!!

[Dylan Rickenbacker]

I don't quite understand the beef you have with zooming using Alt + left mouse key. What in the world could be more intuitive than this? Moreover, in combination with the Ctrl and Shift keys this facilitates every camera movement imaginable. In my opinion, this is one of the neatest parts of the Second Life UI. (Actually, the fact that other virtual worlds like Blue Mars and Twinity don't have this kind of intuitive and versatile camera movement is one of the main factors that puts me off them.)

[Silverfox Rainbow]

i agree on some comments - this place is gonna attract all sorts of unwanted types, - how hard well it be to actually use the tutorials when your surrouned by people spamming.

[Uccello]

Damien Fate and crew have created some really magical spaces that are easy to navigate and understand for a new resident. Unlike past efforts, the "gee whiz" factor is very high. Like Marianne (see above) I was disappointed at the lack of content creation information. With the presence of a "shopping mall" in the Discovery portion the emphasis of Resident-as-Consumer was very clear. Yet without Creators, what is there to consume. It seems that the Second Life experience is becoming "Our World, Our Imagination."

Big thank you, by the way, to all the merchants who have given (really, paid for by The Lab, I hope) all the nice goodies on the top floor of the mall space. Sure, clicking the Pocos Pal mouse gives you a skirt and not a mouse, but there is still a lot of great things. The only thing I'd change in this area is greater clarification that the tableaus are merely examples of what is possible. I had to explain to several new residents that they can shop for or build such items then find or acquire land for their use.

Minor nitpick, of course, but one major one exists. New residents I met all asked "Now what do I do?" The impression that Second Life is a goal-oriented game is very strong. Well, one n00b I met had a clear idea: "I'm here for teh sex." Everyone else seemed a bit disappointed at the lack of levels, points, things to shoot typical of games.

Very nice effort overall and I hope it is very successful. Like anything new, these spaces will evolve, I'm sure, and improve.

[Uccello]

@Raul ... I, too, found the use of megaprims interesting. I posted a pic documenting it on my blog (click my name below or go to http://poultryreport.blogspot.com/2010/04/officially-sanctioned-megaprim-use.html)

[Kimberly Rufer-Bach]

The new user experience sure has a fresh, bright look to it. Looking forward to seeing improved retention figures.

Interesting about the megaprims. I usually avoid them these days because LL won't allow content to be transferred to an SL Enterprise server unless there are rights agreements with the creators of every prim, texture, sound, etc. (if anyone's been able to get a hard copy license to resell megas used in a build, please let me know). I hope that somewhere at the Lab there's a team of Lindens working on some official and allowed megaprims (or the governance issues surrounding them).