A directory for a community - what would you like to see?

Say you were visiting or living in a multi-sim environment, which had a number of different businesses and other attractions in it, all dotted around. You might want to, say, purchase some shoes or visit a seaside resort, but you have no idea where to go without wandering the streets or asking someone who probably doesn't know either. How would you prefer to get this information in SL?

I've been thinking about various different mechanisms, but one common factor is that you should be able to get a landmark for wherever you end up wanting to go. I think that's a given. Another is that people should be able to flick back and forward between different landmarks, in the usual left-and-right-arrow sort of way. That's what people are used to and it's convenient.

Other things...

Categories
Pro: make it much easier to find "a clothes shop" if that's all you're interested in
Con: some places are in more than one category, and complicates the device - may make it harder for more than one person to use it at once for instance

Search (e.g. being able to say "shoes" and it finds all mention of shoes)
Pro: again, makes it easier to find things
Con: invites really long ugly search-friendly names

Pictures (e.g. screenshots of the property)
Pro: Pretty
Con: Slow. I don't like this one much. It's nice, but doesn't really add much for the user, and having to wait for images to load has always put me off vendors.

Notecards (e.g. touch a different button and get a notecard describing the establishment)
Pro: More information, and on demand rather than being thrown in your face
Con: Again, complicates matters with an extra button etc, but I quite like this idea.

Or anything else you can think of, please do say. Primary concerns are:

1. It must be really, really obvious for any visitor how to operate the device and find things, no matter how new or drunk they are;
2. It must be easy to update and easy for people to provide the information. If they have to arse about renaming things and writing notecards, they probably won't, which will be bad for them but also bad for the system.

Pictures are not necessary and anything that slows a process down is to be avoided I think. Other than that, simplicity is the key, which I think you already hit on.

LMs = good
More than 1 or 2 Notecards = bad
Notecards dense with verbage = bad
Maps = good
Categories = good, but not to a level of minutia that could include "red, high heel, women's boots"

People on my level don't like to waste time rummaging through notecards or wandering in search of a particular store in a location loaded with such.

Yes, I think notecards should be very much "this is extra information if you want it before visiting the place". It's easy to move around in SL and visit an establishment anyway, there's not a huge need for a lot of extra text before you go there.

As long as they're optional, for example you have to click on a separate button to get them, I think that people can put whatever they want in their notecards - it's just going to harm their own sales if they're too verbose, it's not going to damage the actual system.

For categories I think that, if they're going to be used, they should be quite broad. Within an area it's not going to be worth subdividing into tiny chunks; this isn't SLX or SLB, there will only be a certain number of places to visit.

I'm thinking that people can provide a landmark with an appropriate title, which will appear as the name of the establishment as hovertext when it's selected. Anyone clicking the device will get given that landmark, and/or a direct link to it via llMapDestination. They can then submit in an optional notecard if they like with more detail, but users would have to click a button to get that - you don't want to spam people with more information than is absolutely necessary.

I would like to be in control of whether or not I get a notecard. I dont like that receiving a notecard leaves me in the notecard folder in my inventory when I might really want to be somewhere else.

Or if its one I already have ...

Discard instead of keep works pretty well .. but I'd rather not just get a notecard popping in my face.

Also .. did you see the posting in the resident run websites forum? About SLHandbook? Might be that working inworld directories in conjunction with a larger offline project would cut down on the "re-work".

One thing's for sure...this type of thing'll be a lot easier when we get HTML on a prim.

A directory type that is time-tested, and has been designed for "the unwashed masses" to use is the shopping mall directory. Perhaps you could divide each sim into quarters (for instance), and color code them. Click on a colored region and get a notecard with info about all the shops in that region and their landmarks, sorted by category.

Below the map would be a text list of attractions and businesses sorted by category, and color-coded to show in which region of the map you should click to get a notecard with more information.