Second Life: Testing a new home page this week

I habitually use a flash blocking plug-in, as I find flash content to be highly annoying.

Why do you even need flash for that? I know its only a screen shot but I could do the same in basic HTML.

As for verbs what about promoting live music? you have the chance to beat MySpace on that score, or Chat, I know you are more than a 3D chat room, but the opposition isn't, so let people know you offer that in addition to other things, and someone already mentioned Create, why was that left out? what happened to the concept of user created that it is not even considered for the home page? and finally promote the economy, that is what separates SL from the rest.

Back to the drawing board, and I think you need to convey your message to your selves before you ask BS or anyone else to conceptualise it for you, the current page says we don't know what we are or where we are going.

Pics on black background? That looks exactly like www.youp*rn.com

The design is High School PROJECT STUFF!! Nobody with any marketing experience could have come within 10 miles of this!

As for Flash.........it's a no brainer......check stats they are freely available......Flash Homepages are a turn off for the majority of browsers and surfers. The problems outweigh what? the advantages??

Nothing against BS but really...I want SL to attract more users and this does NOT inspire.....so for me sadly this is a huge thumbs down.

Why don't Linden ask BS to produce several examples and throw them out there. You guys did that with avatars and it was a huge success!!

Here is hoping that I am talking out of my ****

That's it in a nutshell. There is nothing about that page that would make me explore Second Life.

Wow. A bit hostile here..

There's a lot of things I'd rather have fixed than the front page but I'll wait until I actually use it before I start jumping up & down, I think..

Well, well, well...I see that about 90% of the responses to the "Flashy" homepage is in the negative. I do quite agree considering...

considering that most of the residents (those that stay in SL) are somewhat tech savvy and have experienced the "Interwebs" for quite a while now, and have a deep abhorence to Flash websites

considering all the reasons not to put Flash in the home page

considering that I would want to have my homepage to be informational, functional, as well as pretty.

considering that your customers and residents are telling you...

considering...well, it's your money, Linden Lab, not mine. If this what that 67% markup of OpenSpace sims are paying for, perhaps you, Linden Lab, should consider filing for a Federal Government Bailout.

A little detail on some of the major threads here...

Flash usage: Over the years we've been extremely hesitant to use Flash for all the reasons everyone's already mentioned, so we approached this project with some very clear guidelines. It must be absolutely necessary for the web experience we're trying to provide, it must gracefully degrade for accessibility, and above all it must do a significantly better job at encouraging new site visitors to register. The experience is intended as a tableau of Second Life's richness and diversity of interactive possibilities. It's exclusively directed at potential new users for whom we want to set context, piquing their interest and hopefully anticipating whatever led them to check out secondlife.com in the first place. Video is really the best way to convey this kind of experiential diversity on the web, and the Flash format opened up many video/image presentation possibilities that wouldn't have been possible (or at least would have required much more design & development effort) in AJAX. In this sense the static screenshot isn't really a good representation of the media and interactive components, but hopefully it'll be apparent once people are able to experience it during our live tests. As for accessibility, we're handling it in a few ways -- the header/footer and critical nav elements will always stay in HTML, and visitors who don't have an updated version of Flash will get a static HTML homepage.

Pod content: The pods are driven by a content management system that lets us update and rearrange at will. The specific verbs, images, and video for this opening set are just an indication of how we'll use the framework, and we'll be actively modifying content in response to performance metrics. If a given collection/configuration of pods isn't capturing people's interests or succeeding in communicating Second Life's benefits to potential new Residents, it'll change.

Other general notes: this is a small, measured initiative that had zero impact on our continued efforts toward localization and other web-based improvements for existing Residents. The thing I'd emphasize most is that this is just an initial test, we're tracking the metrics closely, and if it doesn't show a significant improvement, we'll drop it or modify the design until it does. Speaking of design, as the blog post noted, we do expect elements of this look to filter into upcoming redesigns and new efforts. That's meant in a broad aesthetic sense, however, to indicate that we're undertaking a concerted effort to modernize and streamline our look & feel across the board. It definitely doesn't mean that our new look is going to be all white text on black background -- on the contrary, we're moving toward a new design philosophy where our aesthetic is flexible enough to gracefully accommodate the many purposes it needs to serve. By that I mean: some interfaces are better served with a dark palette, and some with light, but ultimately it needs to be a coherent experience. This is a first small step in that direction, and with future efforts the transition should become clearer.

Thanks again for all the comments and please keep them coming, especially if you've had a chance to check out the new homepage during our live tests!

well that's more of an encouraging post, good luck.

New (sorta) forums Linden - quick, catch it!!

Can I have a bear, Cornelius?

I'll put in a vote against black backgrounds with white text, although that is better than black backgrounds with dark gray text like parts of the SL interface's traditional design has.

Basically, you are still going ahead, despite all the contrary posts here regarding the use of Flash, which as a medium, isnt available within the platform.. as I said previously, a clear case of window dressing.

Flash at best is perhaps useful in encapsulated presentations, whereby user interactivity is limited to those physically controlling the content. For the internet, its a dead medium.

We? ...... You gotta be joking... right? Just how many we's are overthinking this project?



All of you give yourselves too much credit for an inconsequential non-issue.

Do you even realize how ridiculous all this looks?

Somehow I doubt it.

You can hang ribbons on an outhouse, but when you go inside, it's still full of the same thing.



We? ...... You gotta be joking... right? Just how many "we's" are overthinking this project?

Don't any of you have anything more useful to do with your time instead?

A 10 year old can publish a better page than that, without all the silly over-thought.



Like this is some magic bullet to retention?

All of you give yourselves way too much credit.

Do you even realize how ridiculous all this looks?

Somehow I doubt it.

Carry on, Rome is burning, but there is fiddling to be done.

I think once you experience the new page as an active, rather than static image, you may feel differently.

As it should be, the interactivity is intuitive, and it's engaging -

It's also worth repeating, this is being tested - not simply the popularity of specific images, but rather to track what happens on the page.

We'll know how many arrived at the page and clicked on what, or didn't stay, etc. -- it's these numbers that will help the evaluation, as well as your feedback.

We'll certainly continue with the test, that's the process, but we are also of course listening to your feedback.

Thank you!
-- Katt

Please ensure that any SL web pages conform to the HTML/XHTML/CSS standards so that all the many great browsers that are built following these standards will experience no problems in displaying the content.

And can I also add my vote for Flash-Be-Gone!! As I do not have Flash enabled on my computer, I hope that your web pages are still accessible to me via a non-Flash version!

Please. follow the web standards, PLEASE!!!

Ang

Thanks so much to everyone for weighing in on the homepage test. We are working hard to continuously improve the the experience for new residents and appreciate your comments.

We understand that Flash is a concern and part of this testing is to understand the impact and trade-offs. We hear the suggestions about using Ajax instead, and from our investigations, we have found that Flash works better for media (eg animations, video, machinima). Through this media, we aim to provide an glimpse of the immersion that Second Life has to offer.

During the test, for those that do not have Flash, we have a detection script which then serves those people a non-Flash homepage, similar to the homepage we have now.

Thanks for the comments and looking forward to hearing/ learning more!

ya know this whole thing is ridiculous, it seems to me that because of past blunders, and also managing to agrivate a large amount of loyal customers and you at LL are desperate to attract new ones.
I realize that quite a bit of hard work has been put into the core product lately. And things do seem to be getting better. However I firmly believe that managing to retain the quickly eroding base of old time Second Lifers would be a major concearn. And this new approach is not going to get you anywhere with new people, that will remain to be loyal customers to your platform in the long run, untill you finaly adress some of the underlying issues that many of us have been complaining about for quite some time now. My major beefs with LL are as follows
#1 dump .bmp textures as the default and switch to .jpg / this will cut down on back end server overload and allow in-world textures to render more quickly.
#2 dump QuickTime as the in-world video media transfer, and use Flash in its place

I wish you the best of luck, as i remain in a total holding pattern, and slowly migrate onto other virtual worlds

JayR Cela :_)

So no matter what we (all stable residents) think about the new flshy thing LL dont "hear" us make it any way.
So my cuestion is , whay put this notice on the blog and forum ? hear hour opinion (i think we all already post something about that) ?

Just use it and dont take any "sugestion" from the people who create things, meet people , teach, learn ,maintain the wheel of creativity and live they 2nd life like they whant it.

Let me get this right... you dont want the feedback of residents, just count numbers of new people. LL will never learn.

/me New Possible Resident

My system, upon arriving at your site, might have to D/L the latest version of Flash. Nope, no way.

Then I have to deal with the white on black text. Then I have to figure out wth the site is all about, if I can resize the darn text. And BTW I have no knowledge of Flicker etc.

Has anyone at SL, or the company designing this site, even THOUGHT this way??

/me Lost resident

I have to agree. This is a knockoff, although more cluttered, than the BS home page. BS might be able to get away with a black background because they are a big design firm. The black would even work on other games...but don't think it works at all for SL.

Thanks Cornelius for posting additional details and insight. This helps us understand a little better the thinking that went into the process.

One quick question. You mentioned how important video is and I could not agree more. Since SL uses QuickTime for the media streams in SL, why not use QuickTime? You'll get a richer clip. If the prospect doesn't have QuickTime then adding it will be important to ensure they can get media in SL. You won't have the security holes with QuickTime that you have with Flash. It appears that BS's forte is Flash driven sites. I also know LL has a new exec that drove Flash at Macromedia before joining Adobe. Are these some of the points driving Flash. I sure hope LL is not contemplating changing from QuickTime to Flash for media access in SL.

Thanks again for posting some of the thinking behind this page.

Three things that seem to guide LL:

Is it cool?
Does it not explicitly exclude anyone?
Can it be handled by code rather than policy?

Here's one you should try adding to the mix:

Is it useful?

Ignore the wonderful technology for a moment and take a look at those pods. How many of them are actually compelling? There's an avatar with enormous boobs. The word Flirt sticks out. The Dance image is kinda interesting. The rest?

Could you have found an uglier place to shop?
What am I seeing in the Play image?
Was the word Learn slapped on a random image?
Is there anything else recognizable in the image with the pharmacy sign?

The images may be too small to be useful, or they may have been selected by people who don't give a damn about SL, or by someone whose monitor is a lot brighter than mine, but for me...it's mostly clutter.

Stop thinking about SL as something to see. Compared to games with professionally-prepared content and optimized scenes SL is kinda ugly. Start thinking about it in terms of what there is for normal people to actually do. Your problem isn't getting people to try it out. Your problem is the universal question people have when they get here...

Now what?

Finding *people* in this game is made more difficult by LL being easily impressed with technology, not wanting to offend the mediocre, and more willing to work with code than with people.

Showcase is a step in the right direction, but it's kinda hidden, and it's a mix of Linden pets and things that are included for what I can only imagine is an attempt to seem inclusive so that it can't be claimed it's all someone's pets. How much of it is actually useful? If you're going to include things for the sake of being inclusive, put some effort into it or farm it out to someone who cares. Why isn't it a place where you can find the best of SL? More importantly, why isn't it a place where you can go to find *people*?

Stop listening to fast-talking geeks with flashy (no pun intended) technology to sell you and start making SL a place where people can actually connect. Your residents can't do that for you because they can't put in the full-time effort it will take and they can't count on their efforts being easily accessible. You control the viewer and the website and you have paid staff, so you need to do this. Or pay someone to do it.