Linden Lab Hiring Senior Product Manager to Improve First-Time User Experience -- Here's Who I'd Recruit

Here's an ideal job offer for a UX designer/product manager who is up for the challenge of accomplishing a task that hasn't been solved in near 20 years*: Improving Second Life's first-time user experience so it drives retention.

Tasks include:

Overseeing, planning and execution of projects: production schedules, resourcing, and quality assurance against quantifiable goals. Immerse yourself in Second Life to attain a deep understanding of the feature set and use cases and learn the culture by getting to know the user community.

Promotion of the value of core experience of Second Life to other parts of Linden Lab, and help ensure Product leverages the ideas and resources of the larger organization.

The wording above makes me nervous, because it implies they're not looking for someone who already has a deep understanding of Second Life. Linden Lab once had dozens of people recruited from the SL user community, but that's since dwindled to a handful.

Anyway, I believe the ideal hire has both experience in Second Life and other virtual worlds:

For instance, from either Roblox or Fortnite, either as a community creator or someone employed at Epic or Roblox Inc. What's sorely lacking at Linden Lab is someone who deeply understands Second Life at its best and also understands how other immersive platforms have managed to grow their user base. 

In fact, I feel so strongly about this, if you believe you're qualified, hit me up on LinkedIn and I might write an endorsement! (No promises, either on an endorsement or whether it'll help, but I'd love to help if I can.)

I'm not exaggerating about the 20 year challenge: Linden Lab has tried many multiple improvements to the user experience since 2003 and nothing has significantly improved retention. It's so vexing, someone should write a book about this. Oh wait.

Comments

[Corcosman]

How long has it been since the Lab stopped sending new Residents who take the Newcomer Friendly Portal to Resident run live help areas? Two years or more? Places like Helping Haven, Caledon Oxbridge, New Citizens, Inc, and New Resident Island are ghost towns compared to what they were. It's rare new user that finds their way to one of them through Destinations. It's been a long journey from "let the Residents build the world" to wherever we are now.

[Yves Firlan]

To make SL a good experience for Newcomers you need to do two things:

1. Update the default settings so any system they might have runs halfway stable with decent graphics after installing the viewer for the first time (like: did they ever change the default setting for bandwidth from 500 to 950/1000 which is one of the main reasons things rez frustratingly slow for Newbies?)

2. Connect Newbies with a help group so that they can start interacting with others and ask questions right away like Corcosman indicated.

The way SL is designed it will never be easy to use, one can only make it easier for Newcomers to stay by assigning them a Mentor who should get some type of remuneration from LL depending on how long they can make their Mentees stay and come back into SL.

[Adeon Writer]

I don’t think there is a single new user experience in the history of Second Life’s carrier that prompts you to join groups you may be interested in. Such a no brainer for social.

[Valeria07284327]

I think there are 2 problems with newcomers, it is difficult to understand the appearance of the avatar, there are many things, classic, mesh, aplier, bom, bento, etc., that must be reduced.
And the second point, and perhaps the most important, is how difficult it is to make friends in SL, everyone is AFK.

[Penny]

A lot of good points in the comments.

To improve graphics and framerates like Yves suggests would require LL to get content creators to optimize their work, until laggy content is phased out SL isn't going to run well even on high end systems, let alone the average person's computer.

Connecting with groups is important. I agree with Adeon, it's astounding LL never figured that one out. To take it further, groups need to be improved. (Or maybe we need a feature separate from groups that can act more as a social hub, as current groups are tired to land ownership and other features that limit how many groups we can have, cause group chat issues, etc.)

Like Yves and Valeria point out, SL is confusing and LL has only made it more confusing. Refusing to update the default body, instead pushing us to user created mesh bodies, fractured the entire avatar creation aspect of SL. Now you need to choose a mesh body, which costs money, and to make an informed decision you need to understand the THREE different types of rigged mesh (rigged, fitted, and bento), understand that clothing is made for specific bodies, and have a grasp of what kind of clothing support each body has. How is a newbie supposed to figure all that out on their own?

And all this only scratches the surface of what's wrong with the new user experience.

Who ever LL hires for the job is going to have a difficult task on their hands. And not just redesigning the new user experience, but convincing LL to address a multitude of issues they created that make SL so unnecessarily difficult and unappealing for new users.

[pixels]

I kinda addressed this in my forum post reply to LL's announcement of fee increases.

https://community.secondlife.com/forums/topic/496979-infrastructure-investment-update-buysell-fee-change-and-land-pricing-effective-mar-6-2023-discussion/?do=findComment&comment=2569806