Landbot gets a $1L 4096

I prefer the "dancing bunnie problem", it's much more colourful and cute .

Let's say you're a clueless newbie and you want to give your land away to a friend. You go to "About Land" but the only thing you can do there is "Sell Land". The jump from "I want to give my land away" to "Oh, I guess I could just sell it for a token sum and it would accomplish the same thing" isn't generally intuitive.

*If* it is intuitive to you and you'd come up with it on your own, then all the better, but in that case you're just likely to read everything over anyway.

If it's not intuitive to someone and they'd need to be told that to give their land away to someone they'd have to sell it (plenty of people if not the majority), wouldn't it just be easier if there was a "Transfer Land" button in the first place?

Excellent post, Talarus Luan. Well said.

-Atashi

I understand the point of the hypothetical example, but it is mistaken. You cannot fit a diesel nozzle into an unleaded tank orifice, it is too big.

Which brings me to my point of human factors engineering in computer interfaces. Don Norman calls the difference of nozzle and opening sizes a "forcing function"; by virtue of their construction, you cannot mistakenly put diesel in your petrol car. This system was intentionally designed because people do make mistakes and if you can easily prevent them from making simple but costly mistakes, a good designer should do so.

The SL user interface is a model of poor design. A prime example is the prim edit properties dialog. This dialog is what I call a "bare metal" interface where the underlying model is exposed directly to the user with no guidance toward tasks that a user might want to accomplish. Engineers are notorious for making these kinds of interfaces which are pleasing to engineers ("hey I know how the underlying model works and this gives me total access" but are rightly reviled by users. A user is more interested in tasks like "give me a bar connecting this and that". Google's SketchUp is a very good example of the same task (3D modeling) with an interface that is far more task oriented.

Yep, the land sale dialog used to be even worse, but it is still quite deficient, partly because of the rest of the UI design. For example, until recently, the confirmation dialogs for dance machines and debit permissions were virtually indistinguishable. Moreover, when you assault the user with too many confirmations (e.g. dance machines) you numb the user toward other confirmations. An extreme example is Vista's User Account Control system ("you are opening the control panel do really want to? Allow/Deny". The UAC pushes all the responsibility for system security out to the user who is least qualified to understand the implications of their actions.

It has long been axiomatic that no matter how many confirmations you present to a user, they will typically Ok them, especially if you give them too many. Do you want to delete this file? Really? Are you really sure? Positive? Users will answer "yes, yes, yes, yes, damn!" This is why undo has become a ubiquitous feature becauseExcept in land sales with landbots there is no time to undo the erroneous action. You can blame the user for failing to understand all of the implications of their actions, or you can blame the designer for not having allowed for the correction of their errors.

SL is difficult enough to use as is, this land sale process is primarily the failure and the responsibility of the designers.

I can't resist adding my own little story.
I got really lucky with my "first land" 512sqm plot: it was 32 m from a big Linden beach and right on the edge of another piece of protected land. It's always been a really nice neighborhood.
Then I got even luckier because my next door neighbor wanted my land so he could expand his property. After making several offers that I wasn't interested in he finally offered to make a straight swap with me for a 512sqm plot right on the beach and only 32m from the other protected land.
I had carefully read all of Skye Whitcroft's sticky recently because of some other land dealings I'd been doing. And I knew about land bots etc. And I didn't really know if I could trust this guy. AND I had to sell him my land before I bought his because otherwise my tier would go up for the month. And I really loved my little home.
So I was really nervous about the whole thing and I guess he was too.
Anyway I sold him my land for L$1 and then I realized that because the land I sold was actually owned by my group I didn't have the tier to buy the new land personally. And we didn't know how to set it to sell to a specific group.
But while I was waiting for Firefox to open so I could research how to get my tier back from the group he impulsively set his land to sell for L$1 to anyone.
Before he even had time to tell me what he had done 4 strange avatars were hovering next to us and the land was owned by someone new who wasn't me.
I was having a heart attack.
Fortunately the bot that got the land was one of Skye's. My neighbor contacted her and within 2 minutes she was there and sold it to me for the $L1. Thanks again Skye. I love my home!
If it had been one of the less scrupulous land bot runners I think my neighbor would have made it right for me but he would have been out a nice piece of land.
If there had been a even a one minute delay before those bots knew the land was for sale he would have had time to tell me to buy it quick and I would have.
If I'd ended up just losing my home I would have learned a valuable lesson.

As a programmer who has dealt with the general public interacting with some of her work, let me tell you -- it doesn't matter if the nozzle fits or not. They will metaphorically put the diesel fuel in the unleaded tank anyways, if that's what they want to do.

They'll stand there spraying diesel all over the side of the car, content in the knowledge that at least some of it will get in the tank. More likely they'll wedge the filler receptical open with their keys, fold up a magazine and use it as a funnel, and feel proud of their ingenuity in solving the nozzle-problem that the idiot programmer created.

I'm not saying that the land sales dialogs cannot be better. I am saying that no matter how much better they are, someone will circumvent them through misunderstanding or apathy, then feel cheated afterwards.

-Atashi

I agree with Plato.

And to the people whose thinking is "Tough luck. She didn't read all the information available, so she got what she deserved." Just WHY do you object to helping these people out by making the buy/sell interface simpler? Will it somehow impact your business dealings? Your enjoyment of SL? Instead of complaining about the stupidity of people, why not shut up and lend a helping hand. I doubt LL implementing a better check and balance system will hurt your SL experience.

OT ...Sorry.. I read these boards, but seldom contribute because of the nastiness that abounds here. I've seen many great posts and people that seem kind and interesting. But many of you are very cranky.
/me ducks from the expected cr*p to be thrown back... but I will not respond to any.

So what then, Mal? How should they improve the design? What would you do to the land sale interface? There are nine steps already to perform a land sale. What would you add or change? Maybe when the confirmation screen comes up, a little electric shock should come from the keyboard to make people wake up? That might work Or, maybe a big ZOMG U R GIVING UR LAND AWAY!!! box if the land price is below a certain threshold? What does it take to make people understand what "anybody" means?

Ultimately, the user NEEDS to become more familiar with the tools that they use, or else you restrict people's ability to design things. You can only do so much - the end user HAS to think. There is no escaping that. The prim edit properties is bare by design because LL cannot think for you. Why should you design prims with some predetermined task from LL in mind? It is up to you to change the properties to fit your imagination. Beyond the knowledge base and all the classes available for free, what else do you want?

IMO, you have to look at it from a risk perspective - what is the risk of a screwup?

The risk in this case is that a user loses everything they had, and after searching for "what happened!?!" finds out that it was her own mistake - one she that she had no idea to expect. So now this user feels cheated. It may very well be the user's last day.

So, if I were LL in this situation, I would approach it much like Kitty suggested. The About Land would have both a Transfer and Sell option. Sell would work just as it does now, with the options to chose a person or to allow to anyone. However, Transfer would require a Person's name and optionally a price. Behind the scenes, it all works the same. But to the fresh-faced, excited user ... it removes one very important "risk point" in the process of transferring (selling) their land.

I personally can attest to the "no one is around" mentality. Back in the day, that was me. I didn't know about land bots or the like. I (had) a second account I considered giving part of my land to but in the end I decided the 2nd didn't need land heh. Good thing too, as no doubt I would have lost it.

ROFL!!! I hear you.

Thinking more about the difference between 'transfer' and 'sell', here's one thing that I could see doing which should neither increase the number of steps required, nor require a whole huge amount of programming, but might improve things a little bit.

Change the order of the questions, and change the defaults.

Question #1: Who do you want to sell this land to?
Default: Person chooser comes up.

If you are looking to sell it to your friend, you're already in the right place to find their name among your calling cards, or search for them in the person chooser. If you want to sell it to anyone, you have to specifically select that.

This should catch most of the errors where they want to just sell it to a friend or an alt. Right now it's easy to take 'anyone' because it's 'hard' to set it to the exact individual someone. If you reverse that scenario, make it 'easy' to sell land to a specific individual and 'hard' to sell it to just anyone, then that might catch some of the errors.

Another idea: In the last confirmation box that you get, "You are setting ---- land for sale to ------ for L$ -----", if they have selected 'anyone', then the confirmation could replace the current wording for 'anyone' with 'any resident in all of Second Life' (or words to that effect) and they could make that in bold and red. Again, it will make some people think twice, but won't catch every mistake.

I'm not familiar with the open source stuff, but I'm guessing that neither of these should be too hard to implement, and could be submitted back to LL for consideration.

-Atashi

Well, since we are all touting our RL credentials in a vain attempt to sound authoritative I will join in and say that I do tech support for the faculty of a major university.

Since we are the ones who get to deal with the disconnect between programmers and normal people I thought I would mention that what a programmer sees as logical and reasonable is almost never what a "regular" person thinks is normal and reasonable. Needless to say, most academics are neither programmers nor normal people so you can imagine how much fun my job is.

People who use computers, especially programmers, have trained themselves to think in a way that is completely unnatural, so i think it is tough for them to think like someone who is not trained in this way. This is one of the reasons I have a job and will always have one until computers actually become thinking machines that can anticipate and react to human quirkiness. I am pretty sure this won't happen in my lifetime or yours.

Anyway, my point is this: the land sale interface may seem perfectly adequate to one who is properly conditioned, but to a "normal person" it is probably arcane and intimidating, two things that greatly increase making mistakes.

This means that those saying that "so and so got what they deserved" should remember they said that when they are in a situation where they are the ones who are confused and intimidated, like having to tango or live in a foreign country where they don't speak the language.

SJ

I tried to make clear in my first post that it is not the land sale dialog that is solely problematic, it is a systemic issue of information overload in the SL UI. Should the system really ask for confirmation if the danceball is allowed to animate you? Suppose the danceball actually puts you into a dog-cleaning-privates animation? What is the cost? You look silly for a little bit; but this dialog dates back to when there wasn't a "stop all animations" menu item, so it is protecting the user from a no-cost, possibly embarrasing bit of licking.

Conversely, land sales are done infrequently enough that most players who are trying to do it have never done it, have never thought about it and certainly haven't read these forums. More importantly, there can be a large cost to making an error on a dialog that you've never seen before and - in effort to avert errors - has grown to contain too much information. There have been many suggestions in this thread on how to allow for no-cost "undo" operations on a erroneously executed sale, time delays are simple. There are also forcing functions that could be used to increase the probability that people won't make the error in the first place. Making a user type "I understand that this will let my land to be sold instantly" is a simple (and tedious) example for purposes of this post. Wouldn't this be burdensome to land brokers? Not if there was a preference setting for "I know what I'm doing in land sales, don't bother me".

As far as the "bare metal" interface being an affirmative design choice, I can only offer the sort of guidance that I used to beat my staff with, e.g. "The user wants to connect this to that, do you want to force them to make two mutually referential entries in two different databases or are you willing to do the thinking for them and present the task level interface and let your code figure out how to accomplish it?" They were often initially quite resistant ("the user *ought* to know how" but once their work was complete their sentiments were more like "omg, I can't believe how much more sensible this is". If it wasn't possible to improve user interfaces, we'd still be walking around inside the computer, rewiring it to perform the new calculations.

Last I checked, there is no 'default' setting when you set who to sell the land to--you HAVE to make a selection for the land sale to go through.

But I think a brief warning about automated programs would solve a lot of problems. You wouldn't even have to add an extra screen, just add the warning line to the final OK, as above. Because that's what it comes down to--people simply don't KNOW that it can happen. I think you can only 'blame' people for their stupidity if they are aware that landbots exist and plow through the transaction anyway. If they don't know, why is it their fault?

The tricky part is that LL would then have to acknowledge the existance of landbots within their own interface, and that puts a bit of a smudge on the utopian ideals.

I think LL does keep a very low profile to warnings about scams and other opportunistic business practices in Second Life, because they probably feel it would deter people from wanting to participate, or to spend money on things such as land.


It makes some of us aware of the scams feel they are doing a poor job of serving their customers. But perhaps they feel better that then to scare away people considering their horrible retention rate.

Squirrels have no concept of cars, so run right in front of tires all the time. Are they stupid? Just getting what they deserve?

Most new residents don't know about landbots. So they think it's safe to cross the street (set land to anyone) if they don't see anyone other than the person they intended to sell to near. Then they get flattened like a pancake by L--dbaron M--lin. I, for one, have compassion for them.

I agree in part, but also think that "damn! I was playing this game called Second Life and I made a mistake and lost US$200 worth of stuff in 2 seconds and Linden Lab didn't care" is probably pretty damaging to retention, too.

I think LL's lack of scam education is more easily attributable to their generally poor communications than affirmative intent.

Keeping Mum does deter the scaring off of potential customers and investors, but it also helps to keep these falwa and exploits away from the attention of potential scammers. After all, you don't see reports here advertising the potential security lapses at nuclear power plants, airports or public water supplies that could be used to the advantage of terrorists........

There is no warning whatsoever that automated bots can buy your land within seconds of setting it for sale. This information should be included when people set land for sale to anyone.

This isn't the first time and it won't be the last time that people confused about transferring land make this mistake. The warning should be loud and the warning should be clear.

This is as good enough place as any to thank the majority of landbot runners who return mistakes people make. They don't have to do this, but most do when the person involved contacts them.

And a good place for me to give another personal "F You" to Landb--on Merl-n for his/her sleazy business practice of never returning a mistake. I hope every penny you make at the expense of others brings you nothing but misery.

Ray, tell us what you really think about the Land Baron in question.

I don't care for that evil Wizard from the days of King Arthur very much.

You know ,the Rolls- Royce Merlin engine that was in the Spitfire was a major factor in the RAF's victory over Hitler during the Battle of Britain. It's a shame he is using his powers for evil now.

First name La-dbaron.

Raymond, that flattened squirrel analogy is great.
I have an idea.
(cringes from those who will flatten me like a pancake for not knowing better.)
What if one minute after every land sale both parties had a window pop up describing the transaction that just took place and asking them to confirm that they want it to be permanent. If either failed to click "yes" things would reset to before the sale.
Personally every time I open the "about land" window on property I own I'm half afraid I'm going to accidentally click the "abandon land" button or go crazy and do it or something.

QFT!!! QFT!!!

This is so simple, nonintrusive and reasonable it is hard to think of any reason to object to it except wanting to profit from the mistakes of the careless or uninformed, or feel smug about how dumb somebody else is.

Let's do this.