SL needs a better first impression

http://doien.blogspot.com/2006/03/second-life-thoughts.html

A blog from a President of a tech company.



He goes on to try it again, after being pushed by a colleague, and concludes that SL is awesome.

So... can we get Linden Lab to fix the first impression part so that we can skip right to the awesome part?

You work for em now Hiro - knock yaself out.

It's really kinda assinine.

Though SL could sell CDs, I'm sure he would have complained he had to wait for it to show up and had to pay at least shipping for it.

Yet, he still downloaded it. AND he still had to download patches to it.

Registration isn't any longer than any other MMO i've signed up for really....

You don't HAVE to give a cell number, it's an option so you don't have to use a card....

So really the only thing to bitch about with any credibility was lag. Which no, until LL opens up bandwidth above 1MB per client, there's no way to solve that with any permanence.

Since when? I work for myself.

And yet, despite what seems to make sense to you and me, the guy still felt this way.

The bottom line is that it's a first impression - which is something that doesn't always makes sense, because of the very nature of any first impression: it's based on imcomplete data.

I wouldn't have bitched about downloading a CD, I was the COO of MP3.com, I have seen what it takes to download 4 million files a day from a centralized infrastructure.

My complaints about registration and the others are less about what is standard in MMOs than it is about what can drive MASS consumer adoption. I have seen tech heads blog about Second Life as the Myspace slayer or at least discuss it in those terms as a potential replacement. I think that missed the boat but I would say that streamlining where you can helps drive adoption.

In digital music we had THE SHORTEST registration form for users and as a result we ended up as one of the largest sites. That shortage of demographic data didn't hurt us when we sold $80 Million in advertising in 2002.

I understand the downloadable piece and actually we sell a downloadable for handsets. It is brutal to get people to install software. They do, and they also pay us up front before they see anything else so I don't have a problem with that but I know if it was lighter and free that we would have more people using it today.

At the bottom though, I do really think SL rules. I think that getting people in as easily as possible would benefit everyone who wants to be a part of the community etc.

-Derrick

If anything, maybe it's the stupid-people-filter missing from every other online community?

Based on many of the posts I've read in these forums, they need to make the registration process more difficult then.

Hey gang,

I'm the colleague he's talkin about, and I'm finding that bringing people to my sim, cutting through the orientation (and replacing it with things that orientation does NOT cover) helps my own customer retention value remain high.

Three years ago when I first encountered SL, I was pissed because you needed like, a BRAND NEW computer and like, uh, Windows only, to run it. However, I tried it again and it took a very frustrating week to get oriented. Also, while those were his first impressions, impressions and perceptions are everything *even* if they might be inaccurate. (yes, if people have to fill out more than three form fields, it's annoying, they'll blog it, and people will agree. Mob rules)

Now it's fascinating to see most of my RL friends in there and seeing who groks what. Some of my top A-list nerd friends can't figure out the basics and others who are more artistic (and the furthest) from the gamey-world, do the duck-to-water thing.

I'm hope to continue to bring in my RL pals (since hanging out in SL is somewhat RL work) and evangelize the platform, and teach them the things that they wouldn't otherwise know from the default. And hopefully, we'll have some hard data to say, 'hey we know what the problem is. Let's fix it!'

Or, just do it ourselves.

Spin Martin/Eric Rice
spinmartin.com
ericrice.com

SL's learning curve is fairly steep, this is true, and the lag at the W.A. doesn't help things. Also, the signup process should simply be one screen (not two as it is now, or four as it was previously):

First Name / Last Name / Address / City / State or Province / ZIP / email / Phone

Then a big thing saying:

CHOOSE YOUR AVATAR NAME AND CHOOSE CAREFULLY BECAUSE OF SOME STUPID THING YOU'LL NEVER BE ABLE TO CHANGE OR TWEAK IT OR ANYTHING AND THAT INCLUDES CAPITALIZATION:

Avatar First / Avatar Last

Enter your credit card number below. This is used to verify your age. WE WILL NEVER BILL YOUR CREDIT CARD UNTIL YOU OPT-IN TO BECOMING A PREMIUM MEMBER OR [insert other triggering events]:

1234-1234-1243-1234
01/80

SUBMIT

and you're done.

Regards,

-Flip

I don't remember finding the signup procedure particularly slow or challenging, personally, but there you go.

This is one of the most interesting things about SL for me. You find people who join on a whim or because their friends are here, and then they start to play with the tools, and suddenly someone who's never considered themselves techie at all finds that they have an immense talent for building or texturing or coming up with perfect ideas for events and designs. They immediately fit right in.

That's what virtual worlds should do - enable those to whom semicolons are just punctuation to create and build in them. Technocracy is so '90s.