If you're building a mall...

Thinking about adding another mall to the crowded SL market? Good luck. There are hundreds of them, and I can't tell most of them apart. So how do you set yourself apart? Here are some things I would do if I were building a mall or shop I where I would spend money. Note that they all have to do with making a better customer experience.

1. Seek out vendors, and be selective. Or at least organize the vendors so it doesn't look like a tower of junk, and shoppers can find their way around. I know this means you can't just fill up a building with rental cubes, but a good mall will not be easy.
   
2. The side facing the telehub is the front of your building. Doesn't matter how pretty it is, or that the hill is facing the wrong way, or it's the side facing your home. Also, if you have a popular location behind you, you have two fronts. Understand where your customers are coming from, don't try to force them anywhere.
   
3. Place your landing point right at the entrance, just outside. Most people will see the red bar long before your build rezzes, and will have no idea where the door is or even where they can walk (for example, if you build an entrance porch over water). If they can land and wait for the place to rez, then be standing right at the entrance when it does, it will be much more pleasant.
   
4. Make your entrance big and obvious, even before textures load. Make everything else not look like an entrance.
   
5. Lots of folks arrive from the air. Give them a nice landing spot with no awning or other obstacles.
   
6. Do you even need walls? SL cold and rain don't exist. Give it a shot, it might work.
   
7. Make glass walls look like glass. We make fun of the kids and pets that run into glass in Funniest Home Videos shows, so don't make your customers feel like idiots. A subtle texture with a few scratches or frosted effect goes a long way. Don't count on plain white with 50% opacity being effective.
   
8. Don't place items on walls in narrow hallways. With a detached camera (non-mouselook) you try to view these and instead look at the outside wall. And make your ceilings high enough.
   
9. Make it obvious what's for sale and what is just a display, and obvious how you're supposed to pay for it.
   
10. If you need to place instructions on how to get to the second floor, scrap it and start over. If you need to advertise that there is a second floor, start over.
    
11. If you use them, stairs/ramps should be wide enough and include a railing. And remember, it's a pain in the ass to get to the top and fall back down again. So make going up stairs easier than going down.

General Tips

1. Design for a drunk person with an eye patch. That's what it's like to get around in SL. Movements are clunky and imprecise, and there's very limited depth perception.
   
2. Test, test, test! Do your best when designing, but realize you're too close to the project to be a good test subject, especially if you're the architect. Pay a newbie $50 to walk around your store, or give him/her money to buy things. Or find someone and reimburse for anything they buy. Or just ask a friend. But get detailed feedback. What worked and what didn't? Don't try to explain or make excuses: "Well you have to understand how cameras work" or "That's a vendor, they're everywhere. What do you mean they're hard to use!?" Just fix it. Also, watch your test subjects. They might not tell you everything they experienced, because they're embarassed they walked into a glass wall, or they assume it's too small of a detail. Ask them to think out loud.
   
3. If you're hiring an architect, explain your requirements up front. Talk about what you want your customers to do, and goals of the customers' experience, not just how Mediterranean or Goth you want the place to look. If you are the architect, it's your duty to educate your client, and squeeze the requirements out.
   
4. Plan the customer experience from the beginning.

Your customers are your business, not a nuisance or afterthought. Don't piss them off. And give them a reason to come back, because there are hundreds more places to shop.

Excellent!

these are very good tips for any build that's going to host varying material and expect a lot of traffice. i have one to add.

respect your customers' frame rates. we tend to forget that people run sl on a pentium ii with 256mb of ram and geforce2s. dumb it down just like you do a website. use as few textures as possible. three if you can by, four if you absolutely must. malls, especially, have hundreds of textures loaded by the merchants. and clubs tend to attract avs covered in highly textured prims.

Some good tips here for anybody considering a large build.... I have so often got annoyed and left a place just 'cause i cant seem to get around.

Great tips Milo!! Than you for shareing them!

Aye, I have no plans of building a mall or anything similar in the future, but these really sound like good and logical advice!

Exactly right--especially the part about making the entrance obvious.

If you plan to close the mall,to rebuild,sell to someone else,your having a bad day...
Let the people who rented your stalls/vendors know a couple of days in advance.
Don't just sell/close it and vanish
Dont just close it and reopen expecting me to know whats going on a week later.
Don't just close it, sell it to someone else and leave me hanging for the next 2 days wondering if the price will change or if I still have a space. Wondering if I have to chase you down for the money you now owe me in rent.

Crim

I've got a better idea.... all of you mall owners set your buildings to physics so i can bomb them!!!!! Goodbye all of those stinking piles of crap!!!

Most excellent thread, dudes! Can we add this info to the newbie welcome package?

Thanks all Great ideas Khamon and Crimson. Good lag/frame rate techniques and business practices/communication will get you far, and help you rise above the fray. Keep your vendors happy and you'll attract the good ones, which bring more customers.

But big view land what cause lag! Club have many walls stop that!

In all seriousness, this is a great point. Visibility is key and walls often run contrary to that.

There are open markets in SL without malls and with atmospheres of varying sorts -- like a rustic country fair, for example.

Milo, you've laid this out really well. It is thought-provoking, and beyond that, it is also practical.

Sometimes, if things get really laggy, I turn down draw distance indoors. It helps some... not a lot... but every FPS counts!

Some things that are close to my heart:


-don't put too many items in a vendor, it makes it hard to navigate unless you have some brilliant nonlinear system implemented. In the "too many great products" dept., Changeling Fate has like 260 high-quality eyes... all in one vendor! Eeek. (BTW, Changeling I'm still craving to hear back from you about the yellow-green variations )

-use textures that (subjectively) enhance the welcoming feel of the interior, and don't cast me out of the place because they are big, jagged, and pixellated. A great example of this would of course be Pixeldolls -- even in its current incarnation, because that class lends an inviting atmosphere which matches what is being sold. I have been scared away from some malls because they had honkin' HUGE flame animated textures or distracting patterns as walls! Made it very difficult for me to shop. I tried, sowwy.

-along similar lines, big open spaces with HIGH ceilings help. It is painful for me to watch the camera crunch down and impede my view when I am browsing. I also camscan a lot so I don't have to walk all around the building.

-optimize texture memory so that your product previews are crisp, but efficient. And if possible, holovendors and try-before-buys are helpful.

...then STOP IT!

If there is any individual architect or group of architects in SL willing to take these ideas to heart, I would like to hear from them.

Yes, I am building a mall, despite the plethora of malls, because I think it can be done, and done better, and with elegance and simplicity.

I am interested in building a quickly-rezzing, low-impact, low-prim, easy fly-in mall, marina, park and open-air market on the island in Ross. Please IM me with your portfolio. I will pay standard architect's fees.

My one correct to Milo's excellent list, based on my own shopping and development experience would be: don't even have just one "entrance". This is a world of avian creatures. May sure they can fly right in on a straight shot from the telehub. Make sure they can walk or land boats and have multiple entrances and a variety of levels to chose from. Don't have any windows. None. Don't make your patrons fly smack into any kind of glass, visible or not, while it's rezzing, like insects. Treat them with respect -- let them enter and exit your establishment with grace.

You're right, Random, multiple entrances are just fine. I guess what I was trying to say about entrances (and wasn't clear about) was two things: 1) Make any entrances look like entrances (plural added) and 2) There can be more than one "front", meaning more than one entrance.

That was a very good point about the ability to "land boats." I don't think I've seen a boat dock, landing strip/platform or even car parking lot at a store. Could lead to trouble with prims, and at places set to auto-return, but the number of customers who use this would probably be small anyway.

Not sure if I mind windows as much as you do though. Before the walls and windows rez, they all look the same anyway. I just like to see texture on the glass so it's easy to tell.

I think you solve the prim autoreturn problem by setting the land to group, like a merchants group, and the boat businesses who rent are put in that group so their prims aren't swept.

I'm puzzled why there aren't more docks and boat businesses in SL. Maybe the number of customers are small -- teleporting is probably the easiest -- but I think there are people who would like to arrive style, and also like the fun of boating. It should be tried.

The previous incarnation of Mochastyle had 4 main entrances.. two at ground level, on e with a boat dock ... and two on the top floor.
It also had a balloon dock set up for 4 balloons, complete with automatic docking.

The new version has one conventional entrance, at telehub level. Other navigation is by teleporters to (and from) the Mocha Market and Stonehenge... There's a one-way teleport to the Avalon Store too, but that's just because they haven't set up a return...

I've been building and running malls for almost a year. I've never had any complaints about navigation or layout... Some don't like the white floors in the new one, and I'm considering changing it, but that's it really. If you need help building or setting up, drop me an IM.

I was thinking customers with boats, who just show up with their boat to shop and want to leave it docked.

Siobhan, did anyone use the vehicle entrances? Seems like a cool idea, but because it's not very common, most people wouldn't even think of bringing a boat to a mall/store.

No, not really... just used it to play on the beach I had there...
A few docked balloons, but more often visiting friends than customers. Which is why I don't have them there any more -- Although I have been considering it.

This literally made me laugh out loud! But its so true.

Also, if you're having a store or a mall, realize you're going to create something that will cause lag, no matter what. Try to minimize it, and come up with STRICT rules for your vendors to adhere to. An example; we had a rule that all object boxes must have a 256x256 texture or smaller. Until we started checking and returning, several people had 1024x1024 textures on boxes that were less than one meter by one meter! This doesn't make them bad people, they just didn't understand that a 1024x1024 texture causes (approximately) 16 times the amount of bandwidth use as a 256x256. (Yes, I know they're compressed slightly better, but you get my point)

We have this full set of rules for our store which has kept it as low lag as possible. Its also a handy list on things to minimize when building any area. Design for the lower common denominator, as Khamon points out. IM Jennyfur or myself and we'd be happy to drop you the notecard.

Regards,

-Flip

Why encourage more malls?

Not to knock mall owners, but goddamn, enough already!

At least they arn't clubs.

Well, tbh, a well designed mall isn't so bad... but the huge super-laggy 9-million scripts per square meter kind are just well...

People are going to build. There's an idea out there that malls make big money (mine doesn't but then it's less than half the cost of most of them), so people will build them.

If they're going to build them, then I say let's at least encourage them to do it well. And as you say, at least they aren't clubs... well, most of them aren't anyway.

Luckily, Bolinas is club/mall free. Hooray.