Coffee Pancake

For me it was having that friend .. the activity was immaterial and confusing, I was having enough trouble clicking on things, sitting and moving my camera and chat. My fist successful SL session had almost nothing to do with SL or the technicalities of how it worked, it was social with plenty of the chatter telling me explicitly what to click and how.

If someone is struggling and trying, we have them .. they are likely going to stay. Please. Take your "i want a pictorial inventory but have no idea how it can work with SL conceptually" to it's own thread and hammer out the details of exactly how it's going to work. Please Arielle, read the OP. This is not a repeat of the usual threads. Stop trying to make it one. First impressions. Failure of expectations. Usability or accessibility show stoppers. 10 minutes and gone.

Yes, but you're here .. grumbling, but still here. inventory and shopping we're not a sufficient barrier to entry. We're talking about the people who aren't here and we can't just presume they're too dumdum to figure it out given a little motivation.

Inventory and shopping happen well after the "first 10 minutes", my post, this thread and position is that we loose people long before they discover how convoluted playing dress up is. New user logs into SL, Oh wow .. this is not for me, leaves. What went wrong.

This is the thing, we made it over the hump .. statistically, we're a tiny minority and if there are common threads to what helped us, it's most often "I had a friend". That's my excuse .. I had joined SL, paid the $10 fee, and bailed after my first session, I don't even remember the name of my account or why I bailed .. something something garbage guess I just wasted a tenner. The next time I came to SL, there was a friend waiting to TP me away from newbie island and into group gambling (Yahtzee with a pot for the winner), I came back the next day and fell right down the rabbit hole. My experience has been that people either haven't heard of it, or they deny / don't want to talk about it because they came for the sex. Yeah, I agree that opening SL and expecting RPO is going to be a crushing let down .. probably well inside the 10 minute window. The blue woman on the website is perhaps inspired by a movie search term that used to drive a lot of traffic to SL signups, people looking for "Avatar" .. Searching for that, finding SL, yeah that's probably a 10 minute crash and burn too.

I think by the time a new user has discovered that both bots and sex hotels are a thing, we're waaaay past failing in the first 10 minutes, we're just grumpy and disappointed.

A comment in a different thread got me thinking and it feels like this is something worth talking about. SL has always had a shockingly low retention. Signups out the wazzoo, people staying .. not so much. Millions of signups. 50K Online at best. The blame has always been placed on the new user experience. We're just not showing the newbies the right combination of things to make them stay forever, maybe the starter avatars are bad, maybe the helpers are bad, maybe it's the parrot. Nothing LL have ever done has appreciably moved the dial. I've joked before they could drop new accounts straight into a volcano and it would have no impact on the numbers. While there will always be scope for improving the new user experience and onboarding, and there can always be better starter avatars and better information, more to do, more people to see, more life and activity, this is not the aspect of the new user experience I want to cover in this thread. What I want to talk about is new user expectation and usability. Sources of failure that occur in the first few minutes, long before the user has realized the starter avatars aren't socially viable, or that they are going to need a pile of cash, etc. The kind of things we (and LL) completely miss simply because we have overcome the hump and don't see it anymore. When people start a new thing, be it some social platform like SL, a new game or even a new book, there bring some common expectations. If the thing doesn't meet those expectations in the first (say) 10 minutes the user will decide this isn't what they thought it was and move on. Like if you swapped the covers of a sci-fi and romance novel .. a chapter in and most are likely done. They might not be able to put their finger on exactly why they are done, just that this (whatever this is) isn't right. SL is broad and covers a tremendous amount of ground, it's impossible for someone to show up and after an hour have decided the content (or lack thereof) is the problem. Even if we magically get them to the perfect content inside the first 10 minutes, they likely wont appreciate it lacking the wider social context, not see the wood for the trees and leave for entirely different reasons. I seriously think what we have is a more fundamental usability problem. SL does things the way SL does things because that's how SL has always done things .. what if we're doing it all wrong. What are we screwing up in a new users first 10 minutes. Do they press W to walk forward, type wwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww in chat and freak out? Do they seen an avatar, fall face first into the uncanny valley, and are subconsciously biased from that moment on? Does the lack of smoothness and a hint of jank put them off? Do they have an immediate "how do I" question and then just give up?

You can't have long form discussion on Discord any more than you could on IRC, and precious little good came from that anyway. Although it is easier to have community with name recognition. Discord drama ends up in a shouting match waaaaay faster than here.

The only way to get two avatars into a predictable position relative to each other is to have them both sit on a separate rezzed object - like a pair of pose balls.

This is a really common misconception. The existing land will not, and can not, be upgraded to 2048. That's not how SL works. With PP you can own up to a total of 2048 sqm of Linden land, mainland and or linden homes in any combination, without needing to pay additional tier fees. Currently, Linden homes are only 1024 or 512 sqm in size. So with PP you will have some allowance left over. You can use that to get some regular mainland. Linden homes that are 2048 in size is promised, but aren't available yet. I've had to explain this so many times since PP was launched, to people who have paid for PP expecting they would get more prims.

Yaaaaayy !!!!

Legacy search is a blunt tool and not really much of a search by any standards, but it still has value to users and I hope LL recognize that value. And yes, the existing legacy search depends on LL server side functionality. LL can withdraw the data those old search interfaces depend upon at any time. We had been hoping to marry the new search with the old interface and try and get the best of both worlds, but unless LL give us APIs to do this we're sunk.

That really depends on the Apple ARM port of the SL viewer .. oh .. nevermind.

Then I guess you're doomed. because this is now "fixed". Job done. Marketplace is next. We asked multiple times at the most recent web meeting if we could have APIs so we could present the web search in a similar way to legacy and got ignored every single time. I am half expecting legacy search interfaces to be withdrawn.

Our minds are built on a number of fundamental assumptions about the world they operate in .. one key assumption is that there is only the one real world. So all worlds are equally real, all that varies when it comes to virtual spaces is the immersion and intensity of the experience.

They just fixed this .. it was announced at previous web user group. I don't know what you expect to Linden's searching for "Linden Lab" to find .. It's a bit like telling them to search for "sausages" and then citing the zero results as proof of something.

To follow on from Lillani ... not knowing any of the active or contextually operational words might have been "fun" in the 80's, when such head scratching was required to stretch out the gametime, please don't just make the help command issue a pithy message.

I've had that exact conversation on these forums ... up to and including the "am I bothering you"

No they do not !!! Or at least if they do they refuse to tell me what it is and then get aggressive.

A smaller post editing window is preferable. This thread is all the evidence needed as to why that would be a good idea.

The sailing community winning friends as usual ...

Wouldn't be upset if you locked and hid .. there is a lot of personal information in this thread.

you know about the replace links thing .. right ? Right click an object, pick replace links .. then drag the new thing on to the dialog and hit start .. all link to the old thing are replaced with links to the new thing .. This is in the Linden viewer, so should be in every viewer ..