Second Life: Testing a new home page this week

Over the course of next week, we will be testing a new design for the secondlife.com home page. The page really showcases the richness and breadth of the wonderful creativity and possibility of Second Life and is a small first step towards a larger redesign of the Second Life experience.

This homepage project is an example of the kinds of projects (small in scope, new user friendly, utilizing outside design resources from Big Spaceship*) which we will be doing more of in the future to bring more Residents into Second Life.

The design is optimized for the new user coming to secondlife.com for the first time and is not logged in. The logged in homepage (which is what most Residents, as opposed to potential Residents see) will not be changing.

Here are the goals for the design:

* Express the richness and breadth of Second Life

* Allow us to address a wide range of potential Residents

* Set context for what a potential Resident might do in Second Life

The team produced a gorgeous design that uses Flash. In order to test the new design, we’ll be pushing this new page live for a few hours next week, so we can evaluate the impact to traffic. Since Residents that log in get cookied (and directed to the “logged in” home page), the impact to Residents as we run our test should be limited.

You might see it as we run our tests. But we don’t want to skew the results of the test, and we won’t be pushing it out to a broader audience until we have data.

Pods and Verbs

The core of the design is a nine-pod layout and a carousel of pods that can be “flicked” from left to right to reveal additional pods. This is allows a potential Resident to see a wide range of experiences available to them.

Each pod has a beautiful visual from inworld or text that serves as a small billboard. It’s exciting to be able to show the amazing creativity and beautiful avatars Residents have created.

Some of the pods include “verbs” – the things you can do in Second Life – like shop, build, play, flirt, learn. Verb pods expand to play a short animated Flash clip that shows the Second Life experience in motion.

Flash is great for these kinds of interactive and animated experiences and will help us to provide great windows into the world of Second Life. But we recognize there is a tradeoff between accessibility and the richness of the experience, so we will have an alternate page with static graphics.

What’s coming?
The rest of secondlife.com has not been refreshed, so we expect elements of this look to make its way into the rest of the registration flow and elsewhere on the site.

In addition to the homepage, we've been working to improve the registration experience for new user. In the coming weeks, we'll be introducing localized registration for all new users, including the option for new sign-ups to select a first landing location in their language- thanks to the Community Gateway Program.

We plan to continue improvements to increase the numbers of new Residents so stay tuned.

Let us know your feedback!
We would love to hear your feedback, get suggestions for pods and verbs, and hear your suggestions. Let us know here, in this forum.

We won’t be able to get to read it until tomorrow morning (that's December 16th, pacific time) so please be patient. We look forward to reading and responding to your comments then.

Thanks!


Second Life: Testing a new home page this week
Read the original blog post at http://blog.secondlife.com/2008/12/15/second-life-testing-a-new-home-page-this-week/#comment-621711

notes:
[*Read more about Big Spaceship: http://blog.secondlife.com/2008/11/03/transforming-the-second-life-experience/]

[** Read more about the Community Gateway Program: http://secondlifegrid.net/technology-programs/custom-virtual-world]

We would love to hear your feedback, get suggestions for pods and verbs, and hear your suggestions. Let us know here, in this forum.

* We won’t be able to get to read this thread until tomorrow morning (that's December 16th, pacific time) so please be patient.

We look forward to reading and responding to your comments then.

Flash? I'm worried. Why run a plugin when plain HTML or a bit of JavaScript+HTML will do.

Big Spaceship's own all-flash website... *shudder*

In addition attention has to be paid to accessibility when working with Flash.


But the main page does need some change, both the guest one and the logged-in one.
I hope it could answer the question "why sign up".

As I've recommend in SLViews, and as I've said to various Linden Lab staff members:

De-brand "Second Life". It's seriously not a good name. It implies "escapism" and "game" and leaves very little room for "business", "real life", "real interaction",and "a logical extension of the internet". These are things that are necessary for the long-term survival of Linden Lab's platform.

That said, "SLGrid" is a good first step, and now that you are redesigning the website, now might be a smart time to make another step. Simplify the front page. Do the CNN / other news website thing and let people set preferences. Put SLGrid / business portal type offerings as a major offer. Simply - from the very get-go, market SL simultaneously and *separately* as an entertainment / role-play / escapist venture, as well as a platform for 3-D immersive media.

If I had to imagine it myself, it'd be a very, very simple first page divided into maybe 3 options:
- Second Life: Connect as a resident!
- SL Grid Business Solutions
- Education on SL Grid

And further, I'd suggest making Second Life a *sub-brand* of SLGrid. Make your primary product "SLGrid" and "Second Life" is just one flavor of it. Kind of like Kentucky Fried Chicken managed to rebrand successfully to KFC, or Hewlett Packard to HP. But please, if the decision's not already made ... "Second Life" as your primary brand is not a long-term overall solution that will succeed.

Thanks for sharing the news. I have to say - well, I trust that the visual metaphor will be far more compelling than the current site, which strikes me as a cluttered link list with some dated looking pictures of people shopping, And I love the verb idea - let people know what they can DO...shop, build, collaborate, boink, RP, yiff, teach, attend metanomics.

But you know - I have to say that as exciting as it is....can't you at least post a screen shot? After telling us that it will be next to impossible for residents to SEE it, that it's being tested, that it's gorgeous and uses Flash (the loading bars of which will remind me of teleporting)...then you ask for comments and yet we can't even SEE it?

At least slip us a pod or two. Or a font? How about a pod flipping icon?

Come on....just need a little, tide me over, we'll pay you back with amazing insights next week, I promise.

Flash? You're kidding, right? You do know that flash is not accessibility-friendly, and that SL has a huge accessibility community i.e. people who can't use the typical mouse/keyboard combo... right?

I know I know, don't judge until I see it, but I'm hoping someone at BS has taken this into consideration.

Yeah, I forgot to mention this. Ditto. Second Life currently is *too difficult* to access. No need to make it more difficult for more people. This shouldn't be like, a Hollywood movie website. It needs to be like, Facebook. Yahoo. AOL. CNN. = Portal to information and access.

They have, don't worry. The main navigation links on the front page will still be HTML, and there will also be a proper HTML alternative to the Flash section for those without Flash support. Also, please bear in mind that the Flash content is limited to the front page.

Feedback on changes that we can't or won't see? Ummm... It's great!

Makes you wonder why LL would choose Flash as a media type, when its not available as standard in the actual platform... 'window dressing?'

Flash driven websites grew in prolifercation when it first became available, but since Macromedia sold the programme, to Adobe/Corel, they haven't done anything with it, except change the box.

If we had Flash in the platform, a version with active scripting.. we could do so much more....

Um -- flash pages usually make me *leave* sites and never go back -- i'll definitely take the html option.

I know flash is corporately popular but I really don't think people realise the effect this has on web users.

ty
/esc

Flash! Nice way to kill a web site. But then it fits the LL paradigm.

Yoz is right.

Believe me, this has been very carefully thought through - Big Spaceship and Lindens have tested these concerns about Flash with one another, and I think you'll be satisfied that the final design is both engaging and usable.

And, as Yoz says, it's only for the home page, and there is a proper HTML alternate.

Dr. Samuel Johnson's right about Olson Johnson being right!

Also, flash still sucks. It loads slowly, it crashes browsers, it tends to ignore normal web browser conventions like back buttons and tabbing to links and finding text on the page and everything else.

Flash is dead as dead, ajax is the new hotness.

A new look, feel and presentation is great and definitely needed for the emerging and existing roles, faces and places of Second Life. What a brilliant way to commence the New year 2009.

Add me to the people who hate and disable flash in web sites by default. Its a poor reflection on Linden Labs choice of web designers that they use a tool that isn't accessible, searchable or needful. Please seriously reconsider this uniformed decision.

OK, that's cool. Hard to ask this question without sounding just negative, but please understand it is asked with genuine interest and rather is meant to be "constructive and edifying discussion".

What was your response to the consideration: "although it's very pretty, won't a flash home page actually drive away users rather than attract them?".

Do you remember the IBM "flaming logo" TV commercial in the late 90s, which leveled exactly this criticism about animated gifs on websites?

regs,
/esc

Well, I'll not see it because Flash just doesn't run at all on my Linux installation, but that's just me. What's not "just me" is much more of a problem for LL:

How will you manage content across the Flash and HTML versions to insure that they're always in sync? That is, when somebody (say, Legal) decides a quick change of wording is needed--is all that text coming from the same repository, regardless of whether it's going to be rendered through Flash or HTML?

And, looking forward a few months, how will the Flash content be able to integrate with the semantic web? Does Flash expose RDFa markup now? (And if so, *how*???)

I think this is an excellent direction to take. +1 from me.

/esc

As an ex employee of Adobe the Adobe website was a constant source of complaints and problems for customers with all that flash and not very navigatable and it makes me wonder if this spaceship company will cause more problems for new customers with a flash homepage and no doubt eventually the whole site. I think its not a good idea, but then when does LL ever listen to us before doing something even when we are asked for comments

Please...

1. Allow people to opt out of this even if they DO have flash support. Flash tends to be bulky, slow to download, and computationally expensive. You don't want people afraid to visit the SL home page when they're logged in to SL for fear of packetloss and lag.

And, yes, on some computers and net links that really does matter.

2. If you want to improve the resident experience, cut down the barriers to actuaqlly setting up the account and logging in. Accept "Firstname Lastname" in either field, for example, so the Apple keychain and password managers can work. Even better, let people have a separate *account* from the *avatar*, log in, then pick which avatar they're going to use.

3. In the game as well.

I would like to see the "new" welcome page, but I only see the standard html website - and I'm not logged in. I've tried also to clear the cache but i can't see the "revamp". I've tried it with firefox, IE and Opera, all still the same.

Maybe the testpage is geolocalized and germans aren't able to see it.

What says W3C so far?: the actual SL startpage has: W3C Validation Output: 37 Errors

The actual Big Spaceship startpage has 2 Errors, 5 Warnings and is made in stone-age old html 4.01 incl. Flash. Nothing to see from xhtml/trans/strict and css.

I am a professional webdesigner. Was involved in the re-launch of several online-newspapers in my region, for transforming old html dinos into fast loading, slim, elegant, well sortet, css-driven, perfect layoutet and W3C - fit websites with additional easy navigation for disabled people and so on. (I live in Europe where some of these standards becoming more and more an official obligation for some biz and government sites, especially the easy access rules).

They are now all xhtml/trans/strict and css-driven (ever heard of that at LL and BS?) - and all my other projects are too.

Even my own biz-site.

Another thing: the new flash-player freezes and crashes the browsers often, no matter if I use IE or FF.

But beside this: I expect the worst case of a code mixed, old fashioned, non-css, non W3C compatible, non easy access for ppl with special needs, etc. etc.

Nothing on earth is more out than flash and old html. Even if LL has a html-alternative. A smart, modern, css-driven, xhtml, W3C compatible layout is not rocket-science.

Well made, it is ultra-fast, perfect in all browsers, compatible to all standards and the most browsers of the last few years and with some extra efforts easy access for all ppl. Even any cool layout is possible.

While flash is boring, slows pages down and is not easy to change on the fly if needed.

K, this "new" thing will run on a kind of html base around, but...

Clean professionality looks different! Really.

There are some css-pros in the scene wich are able to make extraordinaire smart websites.

Big names and not so big names all over the world. Only: they own no spaceship, lol

Maybe LL should have asked them to join them for such a projekt.

Just for being up to date and to prevend complications.

And if it has for unknown reasons to be Flash...then I would know some perfect guys on the scene and some of them are sitting in california... - from BS has no one heard before around the globe.

...

never saw them as featured examples in any of the good webdesign-magazines. Hmmm.

But ok, we will see next week...

I will test that serious.

In Britain the only time SL hits the news is when there is a bizarre or sexual story. Recently there was some foolish woman who actually got divorced because of her husband's avatar's affair with someone in SL. This was prime time news for days. The previous major event was the discovery of pedophiles using an area of SL for there own perverted fantasies.

I believe we see fantasy avatars, sexual overtones and the bizarre far too often and this must be discouraged if those of us trying to develop educational, commercial and clean fun enterprises are to succeed.

For instance why not feature our exhibitions. Professionally staged exhibitions on the Story of Scotland and even the Loch Ness Monster heaped with extra notecards etc.

I won't put the SURL here in case I am accused of spamming, but people can always search my profile to find out what we do.

So, please, balance what you show and help try to dispel the myth that SL is for perverts, sick lonely hearts and nutters! The future of the Internet may depend on its convergence with virtual worlds and virtual environments and that needs to be encouraged within your own output.

Frankly I consider it an assault on my intelligence when a Linden does a tutorial in the guise of a frog and anyone totally unfamiliar with SL would consider it just demonstrates that SL is for the sad loners without a first life.

Hope that is useful input.

Allow me to add my own reaction of horror to a Flash-based websiite; that's an extremely bad idea technically...and yet I'm sure the Big Spaceship people (Do they call themselves BS people? ) explained how wonderful it is/will be.

Because that's what their existing people already know what to do...their solution is a perfect fit for every problem.

Of course, you've already hired them, so it's too late....