Viewer 2 usability, Search and Notifications

[Nya Jules]

Hello, I've been using Viewer 2 for two weeks now and it still gives me headaches.

 

- Search

1) I just cannot understand why the search is suddenly loaded like a website. Sure it's apparently "cool" to make everything website-accessible-like, but dang, it takes me 2.5 seconds to just get the starting screen of the search. There is no fun in using it anymore, it's rather very annoying and I don't go out expoloring as much as I did before.

2) When I search for "Places", a few minutes later the dropdown box shows "Everything" as selected element again. In addition it takes you 2 clicks now to select a category. I just cannot see the usability in this.

3) The result list makes me feel totally lost. It's hard to get an orientation and I guess it's because a) the traffic numbers are missing and b) each result has 2 lines now, making you scroll more.

4) The additional info to each search result shows up within the list. Making you scroll even more!

 

 - Notifications and such

I assume that most people, when they are with other people, camera focus on their heads. This is a reasonable assumption. But this means that they want to see everything below. This means they likely put their IM windows to the top, which again means that the most attention is put into the upper half or the bottom left quarter (because of the local chat window).

Now could please anyone tell me why things like notifications and everything has been placed at the bottom right? Seriously I believe that's the spot everyone notices last. If there has been a lot of user research that proved me wrong, I'm sorry, but in my opinion this is just a usabilty disaster, especially for people with large screens.

 

Well two things that make using SL less fun for me, that much that I felt the need to express myself in the forums.

[Chelsea Malibu]

The new UI does have some customization features that allow your to modify your UI and there is a video done by Torely somewhere out there, I wish I had the link.

On the additional clicks, I could not agree with you more. It seems that with every new feature, we get more steps. In fact the entire V2 project has done little more than produce more steps for you to do what you did before. More is better I guess in the eyes of the Linden Labs even if its more steps.

Bottom line really is this...Second Life inherently, is a beta test.  Has been since it opened and is still today. You are part of one the largest and most significant beta test online in history. The virtual world is a beta.

The Viewer to me is part of this and once they add new features one can use those to build a better viewer much like Phoenix and others have done. In the end, I am sure we will have viewers for everyone's preferences. Say, one for Builders and another for Role Players, etc. Something that fits to the needs of that persons play without the need to make any adjustments or in the case of World of Warcraft, add ons where you can modify your UI yourself.

Just my two cents worth though I agree with what you say entirely.:matte-motes-sunglasses-3:

 

 

[LoveAngeL Lyre]

Hello Nya. Search in Viewer 2 always was and (for my opinion still be) a disadvantage of LL viewers. That's why LL tries to make it better. Many many opinions about the new search, which we will have at the next edtions of Viewer 2, you can see at the following thread: http://community.secondlife.com/t5/Second-Life-Viewer/Test-Out-New-Search-Delivering-More-Relevant-Faster-Results/td-p/891905  created by Blondin Linden some days ago. Also you can download and try the  Search Project Viewer and after you can post there too.

Personally almost never i can find what i want using the search of Viewer 2 and i use the search of Phoenix Viewer, although generally i use Viewer 2 and i like it more than the Third-Party Viewers.

About nodifications and im's now, it doesn't annoy me that they are at the right bottom corner. I can't understand how is possible to "lose" (don't see) a notification when you get always a big pop-up window and also if we accept that you don't see it the same time, the notification remains there and you can check it anytime clicking the icon with the number.

[Nya Jules]

Hello LoveAngeL,

 

thank you for the links. I've just tried the Search Project Viewer but sadly all my listed problems remain. 

 

About the notifications:

I'm on a 30" screen and that's why it might hit me especially hard. What adds to the notification problem in my eyes is that the active notification (when you click one) is not highlighted in the list and neither do group notifications have the group name in the title unless you click them.

Then I don't understand why the conversations are listed twice there. On the left they're listed one by one, then there's a button for the same list of conversations.

 

There is so much (party redundant and incomplete) information down there in the very corner (I agree that you will notice a popup if you look at the screen at that moment), at a very wrong place in my opinion, because

- naturally we dedicate most attention to the top left quarter of the screen

- my attention is drawn almost all the time to the bottom left because of the open chat

-  if not it's drawn to the upper window because of my IMs

 

Of course I can only speak for myself and maybe people with a 21" screen don't suffer from this, but I don't think it's generally good if the user have to look from one corner to the other all around the screen all the time.

[LoveAngeL Lyre]

30'' screen? wow it is like a television!! :smileyvery-happy: Too big really. I understand what you say and i can imagine how is to run the program with so big screen.