New Customer Entry Point Experiment Results

Anyone know what the new customer entry point experiment results have been?

Yes it was discussed at a meeting with Robin and Phillip about a week or so ago. Here are the topic specific portions.

ReallyRick Metropolitan: Yes and how has the New Entry Points rotation worked out?

Philip Linden: The rotations of signs in the WA didn't really help,
Philip Linden: as measured by conversion data, etc.

ReallyRick Metropolitan: So your saying that new residents that went to say The Shelter first didnt join up any more than people who went to Lusk or Bella Feu or Morris?

Philip Linden: Nope.... newbies at the shelter did not convert more.
Philip Linden: that is correct.

Ingrid Ingersoll: Philip how are the choices working out from orientation island? any feedback from new players about that?

Philip Linden: Ingrid... they have not worked any better
Philip Linden: in getting people to stay in SL
Philip Linden: than the existing welcome area.

Yep, I was pretty disheartened when you told me, Rick. I'd like to know what the metric was - but it really doesn't matter.

I still feel like I'm doing something good, regardless of what the numbers say

Well I think it is safe to say a butt load of residents new and old, myself included, KNOW that you and The Shelter is a great place. I cannot tell you the number of times I have heard people mention The Shelter in the WA as the place to get help.

The problem with conversion has nothing to do with putting them someplace cool. The initial experience in SL sucks. The UI is horrible, confusing, and no amount of shoveling them off to the Edge or the Shelter or Cubey's airport thingy is going to help. They need to fundamentally recreate the new user experience from scratch. Start off with a simplified avatar creation process - create your avatar before even getting into SL. Not with sliders and everything - let that come later. A more There or WoW like process where you pick from some hair styles, some hair colors, some eye colors, some skin tones, a few predefined shapes, and boom, you are in. Then the whole process needs to be much more streamlined than it is now. Hide the complexity. That first hour in any environment is critical to getting them hooked. Instead of just putting bandaids on it, you have to throw the baby out with the bathwater and build a slick new user intro. They could easily double their conversion rate by improving the first hour in SL.

I applaud and/or endorse this product and/or service.

Very definitely, Travis. For one thing, this study didn't take into consideration the length of stay of a person who converts, or their degree of satisfaction with SL. It could very well be that for many, their experience with your place has led or will lead to greater longevity and deeper satisfaction.

coco

Well I stuck around because i met a hot chick in the welcome area. Go figure.

I stuck around because I *was* a hot chick in the welcome area...to contradict the previous poster the main reason I stuck around beyond the initial hour was the incredible number of customisation options for an avatar..sure..my av was butt ugly for the first week or so but I saw the potential and it has kept me interested.

Ditto for me. In fact that's the reason why I started playing in the first place, the possibilities in character customization.

A lot of people probably leave SL because, frankly, it does not run smoothly. It tends to be painfully slow, even on modern hardware. Get us that new renderer and I suspect a lot more people will find SL interesting.

Maybe porting into a big free whorehouse with some hardcore dirty music playing and a bunch of hot avs going down and such on the noobs would help.

What Happens in Boardman, Stays in Boardman.

It's why I signed up my first night!

the only concrete suggestion in this paragraph is to have a non-standard method of selecting appearance. That is not gonna do anything about the lag, how to send an IM, how to fly and run, find places, go places, or anything at all other than getting an av that looks better easily.

It's easy to say "build a slick new user intro" - but revealing what that entails and how to go about it would be a lot more useful than just saying that.

They may be looking at the wrong metric and strategies for growth. Content, while compelling, is not the strongest feature of SL.

I'm not sure, but it seems LL is trying strongly to bring in a mass-market appeal based on the content. Whereas, SL might not be a mass-market product. In it's current state to me, it seems more like a niche-market product.

Off-the-cuff observations of the people who have stayed a long time (1+ years) are here because they wanted to be. I bet a good portion were actively searching for something like SL or maybe even an alternative to There or TSO. Others with a certain skill-set or desire may have stumbled onto SL and it just "fit" with their likes/desires.

Reasons why could be varied --

However, I think Christiano has it on the ball. Mass-market appeal means you'll have to not only streamline the experience but cater the product to a wider audience through simplicity. Largely, UI enhancements which are simple to comprehend and have little barrier to entry.

IMO the problem with mass-market appeal is that it significantly reduces the length of customer interest. Essentially, mass-market products are disposable and count on volume to make up profit margins. Low sustainability but high short-term cashflow.

So why not focus on existing long-term users and make your product more appealing to the niche it already speaks to? Customer loyalty extends long-term cashflow -- but it does cut down on high short-term gains.

Give or take I guess. Interested in where LL is going to steer this.

I stayed because this is the only place I know of that allows for fat girls (unless you count Quake III's Lucy)... and even with that, I don't see many of my kind around. I remember spending an hour in the welcome area, trying to customize my avatar away from the public walkway... I wouldn't have minded if the welcome area was completely different, it's the acclimation that's important rather than the environment (though the starting environment should be as pretty and yet lagfree as possible).

I think we have all learned our lesson about giving LL business ideas...

Well, let's see, to make an easy selection of avatars, you could have bunch of pictures of hairstyles in different shades, some pictures of faces, some pictures of bodies. Pick out the ones you want, the combinations are already stored in folders in the easy av prim , and it gives or sells the combination with Wear These checked.

Of course you couldn't have all the flexibility the slider system system has but that is what makes it simpler.

Does anyone know how long they mean when they talk about retaining a customer?

What percent of new customers walk out after their first visit because it is laggy and the interface is clunky and confusing and extremely non-standard for the windows users who make up the bulk of the customers, and they come in at the welcome area which really sucks a lot of the time?

Right on!

Keep It Simple SecondLife!

Ok, I don't know what percentage of new users has ever tried some sort of '3d virtual world/chat' program before, or an online FPS/RPG, but when I first started up the SL client and had a look around, my thoughts were:

1) Damn, I walk slow. Whacky camera system too.
2) Notecards? Good.
3) Hmm. At least the terrain loads fast.
4) Character customisation. Lots of sliders. Nice, but I think I'll just leave that for a while and skip ahead to see what the world has to offer first.
5) Hmm. This ball has fairly good physics behaviour. Hell, any physics behaviour is a plus.
6) Gadzouks! I can create things! That's it. The world is mine! MuahaHAHA!
7) Alright. I wonder where the guns are?

Well, I'm not proud of no. 7, but that actually *was* what I thought.
Frankly, conventional 3d first-person/third-person experiences are dominated by very simple interaction models - you shoot things. Sadly, one measure of a 3d game is how much fun you have shooting (or clobbering) things, atmosphere, eye-candy and story aside. Mind you, since then I've made several things in SL, but no guns There's just no point to shooting people in SL (outside Jessie, that is, but I haven't been there).

Oops. My point was that having tried other 3D worlds (There, ActiveWorlds) and online FPS/RPGs (Project Entropia, Phantasy Star, etc.) it was immediately obvious to me that SL gave me an order of magnitude more freedom - to interact in ways other than killing or chatting (both still being possible) and to genuinely influence, nay, *create* the world. I don't know if SL's potential for creative outlet and flexible interaction is sufficiently promoted to new users or whether that is in fact the sort of client they're looking to market to.

Verily, the possibility of making a flying carrot had me hooked.

Cristiano's really onto something here.

Yaknow, for the longest time we didn't even have HOW 2 BUILD notecards in sandboxes either, and I thought that was wack. Yeah, I did write about it a lot too.

So it'd be a good start to have a simpler avatar modelling experience, and go from there to deeper levels of control. EXPANDABLE.

Reminds me of synthesizers with "macros" that controlled a whole bunch of internal "sliders". You could use those for easy edits, and if you wanted more control, just pop open the hierarchy, get dirty under the hood, and voila! With synths too, you also get PRESETS. I started often with a common piano sound, and then might just add on a flange effect like legos, maybe a fancy delayecho, and then layer it with some strings. Great sound, easy process.

In SL—with 200+ sliders there's powerful punches that can be doled out. However, it is confusing. Having "head shape", "hair type" presets would be a great transition for those from other online worlds. Gets you started, you go right on in, and you change it as you go along!

That's the wonder of the journey, isn't it?

Thanks for the critique. I don't feel the need to offer LL a detailed roadmap to how to improve their user experience, that is their problem to solve. They have enough of a current user retention problem to worry about as it is. I did offer a concrete suggestion, and an overall concept which is to simplify the user introduction by starting from scratch, not trying to weld it on top of SL as it exists now (which is what Orientaiton Island has always been).

Unfortunately, the archaic SL interface and rendering engine just need to be completely reworked before SL can have a really compelling opening user experience. I think LL is more than capable of improving it - it just comes down to resources and priorities. Hopefully the failure of this experiment gives them some food for thought on what the fundemental problems are that cause users not to stay.

Have you looked at the How to Build notecard?



Now it's fine as far as it goes but it's not gonna get you very far towards making that first house or even a giant phallus.

It also has that annoying line "easy as making virtual pie" - i bet there are a number of people who don't find it particularly easy.

It directs you to a webpage for the building forum, but wouldn't it be useful for a person to have some pictures of the object editor and explanations with pointers to the fields ?

Maybe some little parcels showing videos of how to use the object editor?

Or at least some textures with instructions and pictures on them?