Better First Impression

This occured to me as I was replying to another thread. SL is very daunting to first step into. Thinking back to my first impressions, I had a strong feeling of 'blindness' almost. I think it stems from the slow rez/loadtime of your environment when you first step off of Tutorial Island. Because the world around you ins't complete, and you have no idea what to expect, your brain cannot fill in the gaps. This can make peopel feel very disoriented and can certainly turn people off.

So I suggest this:

I. Create a standard Linden-Owned/Operated Welcome Sim.

1. Offer the design of the sim to the best creator.

a. Have entrants submit a proposal and pictures of their other work or pieces of
their proposal
b. Pick the best 3 (Look at friendliness, low system load, etc.) and have them, one
at a time, build their creations for Linden / Greeter Review.

2. Pick the best Design and create it as the new Welcome Sim

II. PRE-LOAD the sim into the Client.


This will allow someone who is first stepping into SL to have a complete first impression without meeting flat gray textures and slow-rezzing prims to leave gaps in that impression. It will give them a chance to get used to SL and its client without having to deal with disorientation from an incomplete environment. Other players will still load slow, but the evirnment, a person's frame of reference, will be present and will give them a 'firmer footing.'

The Tutorial Sim should be where this step takes place, but it's empty, doesn't cover some essentials, and is rather boring. Many are going to just follow the path out.

IMO it's not so much the environment that affects entry into the world. When I joined I started off at Furnation Prime, so I haven't even BEEN to the tutorial island(s).
The first thing that I wanted to figure out though was how to customise my character, and then how to start searching for things.

I think what is needed more than merely a tutorial world is a "Beginners help" thing that comes up the first time you log-in, and can be switched off when you no longer think you need it. It would display a 'splash screen' menu that gives you these kinds of options, Appearance, Find etc, big and bold right there the moment you enter. Once you've customised your avatar you can then immediately leap into the find pane and start looking for things, groups with similar interests, places that you would look to see, things you want for your avatar. Appearance for example would take you straight to the appearance editor and highlight key parts that you'll be interested in (though I quite like the appearance editor, it's one of the more interesting GUI areas, fairly simple to navigate), and when you close it it will tell you how to get back to it later.
After that you then get tooltip style boxes, for example little hover boxes that appear near things you can click on, something that obviously means you can click it, but which doesn't say "CLICK ME" as that's just as confusing as no help at all. I've seen some 'beginners' areas before, which are just filled with "Click me for X!" style panels which are an absolute nightmare!

I mean, the tutorial areas I suspect try to give you this kind of welcome and present such guides for you. But being thrown straight into Second Life like that and being expected to manipulate it in order to get to guides on how to manipulate it is not great. With the above idea you can drop in hints like "To quickly edit your appearance, right-click on your avatar and choose 'Appearance', right-clicking often gives you many extra options in game".
What's needed is perhaps a combination of the two things, a very carefully designed welcome area which is in clear stages but allows the user to do what they want very quickly.
However, the reason I suggest the UI ('splash screen'/menu) + tooltips style approach is that people don't want to learn things, they want to do things. When was the last time you looked at a user-manual for something? Was it because you got stuck after trying to do something yourself first? I'd wager that most people don't touch a manual unless they're either a) stuck, or b) don't know where to start (which is the same as a).
With a UI you can present the options that a user is likely to want access to, and with helpful, relatively unobtrusive tooltips you can show them what they can do in the world around them. The alternative is try and plan a tutorial area that essentially forces new residents to stay there and read things/follow instructions before letting them loose, which while fine in theory, is rarely ideal in practise, sure they can leave at any time, but what do they do if they suddenly want to edit appearance and didn't read that part? Or they want to buy something, but how do work objects in SL?

Not getting on at you, I love the idea of letting people design some tutorial areas, and I think that these should still be supported, but I'm wondering if there is a better way to tackle it, allowing the tutorial areas to be held in reserve for people who feel they want to do them, or are stuck and need help. Rather than forcing people into them and expecting them to go through it to learn that way?
ie part of the tooltips would maybe say "Still stuck? Try a tutorial!" and give you a quick-link to the tutorial areas. Or perhaps as part of a quick-help button.

I also just did a class in Human Computer Interaction this year at university, same sort of idea, tutorials shouldn't be used in place of good UI design. Really I'd have the whole SL UI re-designed; while it's functional and pretty good for people who know how to use it, it confused the hell out of me when I joined. In place of re-designing it entirely, I'd stick a 'simplified' UI/experience in for beginners, with the option to disable it at any time (or enable it again).

Actually, I'm not suggesting new tutorial areas.

WhatI'm suggesting is a pre-cached Welcome area. Help that's available in the area would be good. But mostly I think that if the first sim a new user sets foot on is complete and beautiful, it'll go a long way to eliminating that first moment of confusion.

I kinda liked the "orentation island" thing with the signs that told me how to run the mouse and change things like clothes.
The only issue I had was with the "right vs left" click thing since I am right handed, but use the mouse on the left side due to a wrist problem.

As for the preloaded cache. Having a perm cache on key_ID resources would be handy.

I mean, the library could be downloaded once. Just add a "Refresh" button or have some way for the system to know when to redownload it.

Once that is downloaded the starting point would load quickly.

There are several other items that are still missing links to from the SL main site.
... Checking... Hmm they are linked in a round about fashion now.
->"Support" ->"Technical Support Wiki Home"->"Miscellaneous"->"Scripting Wiki"

The only thing is that my first instint would be to click on "Developers" to find LSL scripting. "Support" usually implys "Something's broke"

I have seen people log into the welcome area and log out after they see it as just a large chat area. Theres just a bunch of Av's standing around chatting. Big deal.


But thats not what SL's about! Any welcome should display all the increadable things SL has to offer. Like an amusement park the where the wow factor should be right up front! You'll never see an amusment park with a large chat area to mill around in before you get to the rides, why? Because a good percentage would see that and leave. The same thing is happening here.

Have it pre-cached with help pop-up windows and make it BIG. So big that when people log out they can't wait to log back in!