Really

I recently got to take a small group of my colleagues through their first Second Life experience.   We don’t have an orientation area as such (Printalution island kindly lets us place our new-born Xerox avatars on their starting area), but we’ve created a small area with some games and other activities.  Teaching new users to arm-wrestle, sit in a chair, get and drink a virtual cup of coffee, gets them through the basics they will need to interact with the environment and other avatars.

Basic Training on Xerox Innovation Island

The session went pretty smoothly, but after having watched many different people trying to get started in platforms ranging from Second Life, to Wonderland, to World of Warcraft and Lord of The Rings Online, two issues seem to cause the most problems for new users:

Unresponsive Controls

I used to think that the reason why people need to spend a fair amount of time learning to walk in virtual worlds is that a keyboards and mice are not good control devices for navigation in a 3D space.   I’m starting to wonder if the problem is caused more by the fact that the controls are not responsive or smooth enough.  In Second Life in particular, because of network lag and other factors, there is often a noticeable delay between pressing the up-arrow key and seeing any avatar motion.  This type of delayed feedback, can make learning the controls difficult – apparently studies response times longer than 100ms-200ms cause problems for hand-eye coordination.  Games like World of Warcraft seem to be better able to provide responsive controls (and you don’t hear many people saying, “WoW was fun, once I learned how to walk!”), probably because the environment is fairly static and pre-loaded on your machine.  Maybe an approach for dynamic virtual world platforms is to have the starting area be static and pre-built in the client, so as to remove any delays due to slow networks.

Too much information

Most beginner areas in Second Life, MMOs, and other games, try to gradually present different aspects of the environment, usually as a series of tasks, each of which needs to be finished before the next one starts.   However, the mere fact that you’re immersed in a rich 3D environment, means that you’re constantly overwhelmed by visual information: colorful, shiny, beautiful buildings, trees and other features, that make it hard to notice the little poster that is telling you how to use the arrow keys.  On top of that is the client UI itself, with all its menus, buttons, and popup windows.  when I look over the shoulder of a new Second Life user, I often see 4-5  popup dialogs on their screen (usually trying to give helpful information about the UI), that they either don’t notice, or can’t be bothered to remove.

Where is the relevant information?

Less visual information makes it easy to highlight what you want the user to see.

Games have the same issue; one common remark I got after introducing some colleagues to Lord of The Rings Online (for research purposes!), was, “There is so much you have to pay attention to!”  Better UI design might help, but even just radically simplifying the beginner environment might help direct the user’s attention to the relevant area.

Apart from the client UI and environment design, the best way to help new users is to have a knowledgeable user sit with them and guide them through the process.  The need for expert help will not be a constraint on the technology, however.  Though we assume that anybody can use a web-browser, at some point most of us were told, “…and then you click on the blue underlined text…”, though we may not remember when that happened.  For many, web-browser training is now happening in early elementary school or earlier, and I wouldn’t be surprised to soon see basic virtual world navigation skills being taught as well.

I’ll finish off, by pointing to a video showing Felicia Day (gamer, geek, actress, writer of The Guild, and co-star of Dr. Horrible’s Sing-a-long Blog) helping out Jimmy Fallon (some guy from TV?) to get started with World of Warcraft.

In addition to showing how even in a game that tries to make it easy for players to get started, newbies can get completely lost, there is also a nice discussion of the importance of your choice of avatar, which ties in neatly with my first It isn’t easy being green post.  Having thus completed the loop, I promise never to use this title for a blog post again.