Version 1.2 thread.

This thread is dedicated to SL Version 1.2 and the things that were proposed.

I like the ideas, they are very nice, but since we're all running ahead of 1.1 in our suggestions, I'm going to post a suggestion I was going to wait on until post-1.1. So here goes.

The biggest problem of inventories is that they can fill up with stuff. With a new UI, I think that an "Object Preview" window would be very very nice to have. Simply open up this window, and anything highlighted in-world or in-inventory will pop up inside the window, where you can look at it and see what it is without really having to rez it. This can work on textures/pictures/clothing/AVs/but-most-importantly-objects.

While on the subject of inventories, how about a "play while inventory loads" option. Sometimes when I come in game, I have to wait for the huge "loading inventory" bar to hit the end, and even then I'll be placed in the game without an inventory because it's so large and hasn't loaded. Some other times, it skips over the inventory loading bar, and I get to be in-world a lot faster, even though the inventory hasn't loaded. I don't know if this is a bug, but I think it should be an available option, as it's kinda annoying to have your AV in game, being chatted to, you can hear it all going on, but you're sitting there waiting for the stupid inventory loader to go away.

Anyone like?

If they can do the preview window as you suggest, I would ask that they also consider having a preview option for an object before a texture or color is applied.

This way you could see the whole object textured and colored and decide then if that is what you want or not.



Thanks!

We dont need a complete redesign of the interface. It will probably be as good, or as bad as this one. Complete redesigns achieve nothing. Gradual and frequent improvement is much better.
I cant understand why after all this time, so many crap has been changed about the game, often to make it worse than before and pleasing only a vocal minority, when 5 minute interface fixes arent added or even thought about.
You can select multiple objects, but for some mysterious reason you cannot DRAG multiple objects, so getting textures from a texture pack is insanely annoying and time consuming.
If you can drag an object, dragging many is merely looping over the dragging function, which should take a grand total of two lines of code.
You dont follow standard interface conventions. SL is very keyboard unfriendly. When my cordless mouse ran out of batteries I couldnt navigate around the interface with the same ease I can navigate windows. I can spend weeks using windows without a mouse if necessary, but in SL I was at a loss.
You dont have an underlined letter to use with alt. In windows if you press alt and the underlined letter you can "click" the relevant interface element.
Oh and for god's sake let us choose the interface color. I HATE GREEN.
The old blue interface from alpha was much nicer.
Also, dont use the windows colour picker. Code your own, god knows I've coded a few and its not the end of the world.
I spent months without being able to add color to my objects because the color picker made SL minimize or crash or didnt pop up at all, and its still not working very well.
Also I dont like or need buttons for shout and god, of all things, an enter button?? Because you know there's bound to be a LOT of people out there who own a keyboard without a return key.
"/shout AAAHH!!" isnt exactly difficult to do unless you're a complete retard and SL tends to attract intelligent people, not retards. Bonus points if you let us alias commands.
I also think the whole "press enter to type" thing sucks. Letter keys are for typing. Arrow keys are for moving. Keyboards have a wide variety of special keys and there is absolutely no need or reason to use the standard alphabet keys for special functions. Repeat after me, letters are for typing.
You dont have a "Yes to all". You have a stupid timeout on dialogues. Yesterday someone tried to give me a lot of textures and I couldnt accept them all in time so now I have no idea or way of knowing which ones did I get and which ones I didnt. Where the heck did you get this brilliant idea?
If no one else has timeouts on their app's dialogue, you shouldn't either.
An easy to use interface is not an innovative one, it's a standard one.
Innovative means strange, quirky (and bad) in Joe User's eyes.
For instance, why on earth use a pie menu instead of a linear one? People are used to linear menus.
Right click on anything in windows and you got a menu, nice, linear and readable. Also menus should have images to go with the text. Color images. Reading requires thought and attention, images are instantly recognizable. IF they are good and well thought out. They shouldnt be too finely detailed or they will be perceived as a shapeless pixel mass. There should be few colors per image and large areas of the same color.
I dont even know why I'm bothering to say this, american colleges must have a human-machine interaction class such as mine did (and i excelled at it =).
I suppose I could pull out my interface book to refresh my memory, it was 5 years ago already.
Oh and please, for the love of god, could someone throw in a basic image editor?
So much concern for needless features such as a separate im program, and zero concern for the obvious. Did anyone even request a separate IM program? I dont remember seeing it in the forums. If I wanted a text-based chat I would have stuck with ICQ. I want a pretty chat with 3D graphics and collaborative building. That's why I use SL.

I've seen a usability study that says pie menus are easy to learn and quickly become faster to use than linear menus; in terms of "muscle memory," people can more easily associate specific options with compass directions than they can with a linear offset.

As for your other suggestions, some I agree with, some I don't. But one thing I know is that UI design is very, very difficult. And asking users to list the features they want often doesn't work; it frequently turns out that, once they try them out, users don't like the features they themselves have suggested. The only way to know what really works s to perform usability studies, which are expensive and time-consuming.

I trust that the man hired to create our new GUI, Oracle Omega, is going to do an awesome job, because he knows the flaws of our current system and will, hopefully, fix them RUMORS tell of a _much_ more flexible GUI that will fit our needs, so that if you don't like some part of it, you can change it yourself! I wouldn't be surprised if we reach a point where we can script our GUI and have it work for us

But you know, rumors...

... Good to see my thread is still alive

I have some 'good' news! I believe you can already customize the UI to an extent, all the images for the UI are stored in a file called viewerart.ini, in the SecondLife\app_settings folder. I havent experimented much with it however, but upon opening it I got a list of keys to the textures used for the UI, interestirng .

-Chris

Hey Jake! I understand and respect your opinion. We could argue about pie menus forever but the point is moot. Usability is subjective, there is no single best interface and different people have different preferences.
However, my whole point was that you dont really need a usability study, or an interface designer.
You need to make it work like everything else out there. "Easy To Learn" is bad. We should be aiming for "No Learning Required".
Why learn if you can simply remember? Not even that - "remembering" implies a conscious memory effort, whereas we all know very well that tasks become so automated through practice that zero conscious effort is required to use a similar program.
Just make it work as similar to windows as possible - god knows Gnome and KDE have been heading down that path for quite some time... among others.
As for the Mac version, I would obviously suggest a different interface that worked as much as possible like MacOSX for the exact same reason.
This way you dont need to "reprogram" your muscle memory.
I've had to adjust to using the US keyboard layout since after all this time no one 's bothered to fix it =)
It's been a pain, and I'm only beginning to automate it - I still have difficulty finding the odd symbol key while scripting.
But the flexible interface idea sounds very good. If they can later tie it into LSL so I dont have to build my own screen out of prims, that's even better. Bonus points if we can share our interface configuration files with other users, sort of like skins, so that the users may fix through "interface scripting" whatever shortcomings the new interface will turn out to have.
I've always liked how mIRC lets you build and distribute your own popups easily and if we can do the same kind of thing for SL it would absolutely ROCK - especially if we could sell new interface skins in-game =)

The Pie menus are one part of the UI where I immediately thought: "Wow, somebody did his homework on this game" when I was doing my first clicks in Prelude. Keep them! :)

Another suggestion for the new UI: A window in the UI that is used as HUD (head-up display) for scripts. Scripts could display text information there or even a texture. This would be very useful for all the information that is interesting only for the user of a script and changing constantly. Now it's all just spammed into public chat. With this HUD, you could have the speed of your hoverboard there, or a picture of the ball when you got ahold of the ball in jetball. Or just the current time and date, whatever your script chooses to display there.

Most of what Eggy said I won't argue. However, these two things I disagree with:



Here you are arguing against complete rewrites of an interface, and at the same time requesting a complete rewrite of an interface!



That's your opinion. I disagree. My main gripe is that I can't map more functionality to the "12345QWERTASDFGZXCVB" keys, and reconfigure the ones that are already functional.

I don't like W-forward, S-reverse, A-left, D-right. I like using the cursor keys even less. I prefer F-forward, A-reverse, S-left, D-right. This is the way I set up the controls for every first-person interface I deal with. (Games that don't allow customizing keyboard configurations generally don't stay installed on my machine for more than a few minutes before they're re-boxed and tossed in the closet. The only reason SL has survived is because I can manually edit the keys.ini file.)

As a general rule, the only time in SL that I'm not in first-person mode is when I'm building (almost never) or scripting (happening less and less these days.) In either case, I'm normally standing still or "hovering."

P.S. What Ezhar said.

Chris, um... I've heard more rumors *wink wink* of people testing those things out and trying to change them, but it didn't work. These rumors are from a very *wink wink* trusting source too.

The whole problem is the BASIC user interface tradeoff:

The more intuitive an interface is, the less inherently powerful it is.

The trick is making something that beginners easily understand with hidden power for the advanced users, which is a real pain.

I believe this to be a misconception. I believe a powerful interface can be built in an intuitive maner. I don't have much proof at hand, I just think it can be done.

Actually I think that's a misconception and the biggest proof I have is the debug menu. LL was actually thinking about not letting residents use the debug menu after 1.0 came out, but instead made a hidden hotkey to get to it, so us advanced users could still use it for our needs.

All you need is the same interface we have now (or the cool new one being created for us) with super-editables as an option that advanced users can eventually find and play with.

As a UI designer (yes pro) I say keep the pie menus: the newbies get a look at all the options, and the pros can use quick mouse movements that are quite easy to memorize to access features.

I remember the analogy they taught us with was a VCR:

If you look at a VCR from 1980, you'll probobly see a whole lot of buttons. Then if you look at a VCR from 2003, you'll see only a few buttons, while the rest are hidden somewhere convenient when you need them, like under a flap, but aren't staring out at you.