User Interface Facelift

User Interface Facelift

Now:
* The Second Life User Interface has been developed just-in-time with the product, creating some rough edges which obscure important features of Second Life. The current UI can also be overwhelming in its breadth, especially for new residents.

Future:
* Evolve the UI to better focus on frequent activities (world navigation, communication), become more approachable for new residents and provide a more immersive window into the Second Life world.

Design Roadmap:
We're working with Randy Farmer, a notable multi-user experience designer (founder of Habitat among other projects), to help scope the future direction of the Second Life UI. Randy is a member of the Second Life community (Oracle Omega) so he's approaching the project from the perspective of a SL Resident.

Here's a request from Randy to collect some thoughts from the community:

=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=--=

What Linden needs from you is your feedback about the UI: What is great (shouldn't change, ever?) What is too confusing? What gets in the way?

Specifically, we're interested in is what was overwhelming for you during the first days of Second Life? Consider this question: What SL features would you 'hide' from new residents? What 'hidden' features would you make much simpler and obvious for new residents?

For example, should the Map/Locations PopDown/Go buttons be hidden behind the More>>> button? When do you open Chat History?

This thread is meant to collect suggestions so please keep posts oriented towards your opinion rather than discussion or responses to other posters. There are no 'wrong' or 'right' suggestions, so please keep your feedback directed at Linden Lab and/or me.

Also, if I am on SL, please feel free to stop by and chat with me in person if you don't feel like posting here.

The future SL residents are in your debt,

Randy Farmer (Oracle Omega)

I think generally the UI is pretty good and I didn't have any trouble getting used to it. A few suggestions though...

The default behavior for chat entry needs to be changed to be what people are used to in other mmog's. Hit enter, type your chat, hit enter again and send and be dropped back out of chat entry mode. You can toggle this now but the defualt should be the above. This same behavior needs to carry over to IM's also.

IM's... there needs to be an option to have ALL incoming IM messages make a sound, not just the first one you receive from someone. It's too easy to not notice you've received one.

Edit mode... right clicking an object and hitting edit shouldn't move the camera. I assume the intent was to move the camera to a 3/4 view of the object so all three axes are visible, but it usually shoots your camera through the ceiling and creates a lot more work than it saves.

Also while I'm talking about the camera... right now it's not a good idea to put a chair right next to a wall because as soon as someone sits in it they'll be looking at the outside of the wall behind them and then have to navigate the camera around to a door to get it back inside. I know that's not a UI issue per se but it makes people have to use the camera controls more than they should have to, and they take a little while to get the hang of.

The camera controls themselves are wonderful. Every time I use 3ds max now I keep trying to zoom and rotate my view with SL shortcuts, hehe. But I still don't quite get the difference between using "focus" and just using the regular alt and ctrl zoom and rotate features.

Snapshots should have a default name other than just "snapshot." Having the date and time as the name would be a lot more useful for people like me who are lazy about renaming them. If I want to find a specific shot I have to wade through a hundred files all named "snapshot"

Fix the land edit tools!!!!

That's all I can think of at the moment. Overall I think the UI is pretty good. Some minor tweaks would make it golden.

I hate the green...at the very least, make it the blue from LindenWorld.

I wish the UI "windows" were something we could drag off screen when in windows mode. Several instances require opening 3-4 windows. Then say you have your map on, and of course then you HAVE to have chat history up since you can no longer read text.. next thing you know you cant see anything ingame.

I'd like the ability to pull these off to the side OR otherwise simplify processes to reduce the need for so many open windows.

Clicking multiple items in inventory (especially trash) has been brought up in prior threads... a better inventory system as a whole would be nice. A tree system was suggested.

I agree I dont want to see every image, texture & photo when I go to texture an item. I DO want to be able to organize textures without having to rename every one (using folders) and have the sub folders searchable when texturing an item.

Thats all I can think of at this moment. The color is fine, I never even think about it.

The minute I get in world. The chat history window is the first thing I tell new residents about, and 99% of the time they are sooo grateful to learn about it.

The tools menu could probably be hidden the way the Debug menu currently is -- I think most builders probably end up just using ctrl-4 before long anyway.

As for colors of the UI, instead of just permanently changing it to another color, or keeping it green, perhaps we could choose our own color scheme, similar to the way we choose the color for our avatars' particle effects. Maybe just have a new option in the Preferences window above or below the effect color box.

Taking that a step further, maybe we could have the ability to color each window individually. Say, have the chat history be grey, inventory be orange, and map be blue, etc. Even better, how about using textures for windows, similar to skins and themes used in other popular programs, including Windows itself? It would be REALLY cool, too, if you could put all the parts to said "Theme" into one folder or inventory parcel, and be able to pick a new one just by right clicking and "Apply Theme". This would let players make and sell yet another type of product.

I was also thinking about the texture picker for objects. Whenever I bring up the whole list of all the textures I have, I sometimes get overwhelmed. It would be nice if that was refined a bit... Perhaps one should look to the Windows Start menu for guidance? You could create folders in your main Textures folder and organize there, then when you're in the picker, you first scroll down to the desired folder, then click on that, which opens up a side menu with the textures and/or folders within.

I also agree with pretty much everything else stated in this thread, but I do want to add this: If you do put in new UI features and behaviors, please, give us the ability to toggle them on or off. Every once in awhile I'd like to turn certain features off, but I'm not able to.

SL is really all about customization and expression, and it would be great if that could carry over to the UI.

Lots of IM suggestions

here: /13/fe/2526/1.html

and here: /13/e7/2528/1.html#post16510

NOTE to Hunter L: we do not have permission to edit our own posts in this forum.

Not only is the camera angle change when clicking edit annoying its even worse when exiting the editor. At least you can hit ctrl-3 to open the editor to avoid camera movement but there is no workaround for editor exit.....

Can we have a shortcut key for the IM window?

Also, a small pallette (with a shortcut, of course) for the various buttons that are arranged around the edges of the screen. Something I can tab through, if i choose.

Perhaps some of the menu items belong in a preferences window, such as Gestures.

Hey, how about a pallette with gestures on it? (Shortcut key to bring up the pallette of course.)

Then the user could put his own collection of gestures that he can popup, click and dismiss.

I have a hard time memorizing all the Shift-Fkey keys for some of the gestures :-/

The inventory annoys me to no end sometimes. I really would like to see a tabed interface that seperates the different things - calling cards, scripts, notes, objects, textures, clothes..... each with its own tree or preferrably unique interface. Such as an address book look for the calling cards, preview options for the sound and texture pages...

Keyboard shortcuts please! First I want to be able to make my own / modify existing ones. Also I want things like /msg nick name some message to work as well as /shout Hey everyone or /whisper hello.

I agree the default chat method should be different and that the IM window should match whatever behavior you have regular chat set to.

Lots and lots of more options! I want to be able to mute specific things (objects, people not in my group, shouts....), I want to set different colors for those different things, set different colors for the dots on the map (I have minor RG color blindness and I can rarely tell the difference between things I own (light blue) and people (white) ). I want to be able to set my own color scheme.

Minimized things should look better, be better organized. The win3.1 way of minimizing should have died with windows 3.1. In fact a whole SL task bar could be great - a place where minimized windows went and flashed if there was an update and where we could put shortcut buttons to most frequently used options.

I would also like to see a 'Simple' mode for apparences, and maybe other places. In 'Simple' apparence mode, there are about 1/4 as many sliders or less, each slider changes many other sliders in normal mode. Combine sliders that are similar. This offers way less customization I know, but I would use it everytime I made an AV - use simple mode to get in the general range of what I want then switch to make the minor adjustments. Instead of making millions of minor adjustments straight from the start.

Simple mode could be extended to which options were shown on the menus also.

And please re-evaluate the menu structure. World map is under help and not world? Account history is under edit? I think there should be a 'Me' or 'Personal' menu as well as world that has a lot of the options dealing with me - account histry, groups... there was more but I'm not in world now.

Ah I can think of more but I will post them later. ))

Also to expand on Ama's simple mode,

Have a custom menu that allow us to select and deselect what is displayed in the tabs/menus/editors, etc.....

Full user customization, of the UI

Other than the very out-of-this-world scripted UI idea that somebody has (I'll let the idea stay with them) here's what I mainly want/need.

Dragging windows off screen.
Minimizing and resizing windows that are currently not minimizable/resizable.
Choice of text wrapping.
Choice of text font/size/color.
Choice of UI color (although I'd probably keep it green).
The ability to get rid of buttons or interfaces that are perma-set (money view or find buttons or menu. I know you can turn them off through debug, but not specific ones, which is what I'm asking).
The ability to keep the debug menu post-1.0 (because I know you plan on taking it out).

And finally, the ability to set your own hotkeys for ANYTHING.

When I think of more, I'll post.

due to inactivity.

No, I'm not asking that this be removed -- just reworked.

As it is right now, when you get the inactivity disconnect, you can't click on various IM window tabs or scroll your chat history to see what people said to you during your absence up until the time you actually got disconnected.

I'd really like to see that changed so that we *can* click through the various IM's and scroll them and the chat history window (even bring the chat history window up if it wasn't already).

It'd be a heckuva lot friendlier, IMO =)

Cas mentioned a better texture picker and I STRONGLY agree that more organization featuers WITHIN the picker need to be added. For instance, I upload ~10 texture files every week for my class (sometimes more, sometimes less) and while I organize all of these within folders in my inventory, this comes up as a hundreds-long list of textures. Thumbnails would also be great.

Also, whatever you do, I would like to see the ability to script our own GUI elements. I realize this might go beyond the scope of this thread, but it's more of a forward-looking suggestion. That is, whatever redesigns you do, please remember about this. Scripted GUI elements could add a LOT of depth and functionality to objects.

Yes, lets have a texture previewer, especially in the Object's Contents folder...I am thinking something MacOSX-ish...where you hover mouse over texture, and a bubble pops out of the side with a picture of the texture

Also...Object's contents needs to be tabbed or have a hierarchy(sp?). Tab for objects, textures, scipts, notecards, themes(I loved that idea, btw), etc.

Being able to pick a UI color is also a great idea.

Also, the speed at which the UI moves is really slow. I feel very 'trapped' when using the UI. I always hit the wrong thing, especially when picking a landmark from the map's drop down.

ok, so I would like to see the UI follow the example of the rest of SecondLife - a bit ambitious, but hey, what around here isn't:

- The ability to skin the entire thing how you want
- The ability to DL Skins just like any thing else
- Script control of the GUI
* Change skins via script (with permissions)
* Add elements, and be able to control customize a GUI HUD via scripts - For example, you get into a car, you get a skin that is apropriate, complete with speedometer. You can use a gun that "recharges" after shots - make a status bar to show power. Altimiters on Jetpacks; Show icons for Inventory Items in games (you picked up the red keycard)

- GUI controls of scripts (hah)
* I can use my mouse to enter a code on a keypad that pops up
* Can make shortcuts to chat on non-0 chanels, thus able to control scripts better without chatting out the commands.

- Ability to take control of the entire keyboard via a scritp.
- Ability to customize keybindings
- Hey, - this is UI - allow me to jack in to the Matrix...er, I mean SL via a . *Operator!*

bbc

I have to agree with BBC about being able to skin... I have to say, after getting used to EverQuest's new UI (it's all skinnable and made with XML), I'm used to being able to modify everything at a low level and even if other places have better LOOKING UIs, the ability to customize everything is something I miss.
And while I was thinking of simple GUI elements, being able to create our own and control them via scripting would be incredible.

In addition to all the stuff mentioned about IM/chat stuff(different colors, seperating stuff, etc), I would like if there was a chat buffer that persisted between sessions. This is mainly cuz sometimes I have to relog for whatever reason and when I do I lose the whole chat history, which can be valuable.

texture previewer - i'd like to see 25 or so thumbnails at a time and page through them.

accept items - i'd like to see accepting objects, textures, etc be moved into a "incoming" button and not have a timeout. if there's a new offered item, my incoming button would flash. i sometimes miss incoming items if i'm afk for a minute, especially if i start SL and grab a sandwich while it starts.

Could we have a clearer payment confirmation?
Maybe a window like "Pay feniks Stone $1000000?, YES NO".

(chose yes)


fen-

Some good ideas from Devyn Grimm in the Feature Suggestions forum:

in-world Profile improvements
Just a couple of ideas I've had regarding the in-game profile pages:

- The Groups list area of the 2nd life panel needs to be larger - often the longer group names and titles are cut off and can't be fully read... thus making it confusing to read.

- How about more fields for the 1st life panel? Like fields for location / interests / favorite music - that kind of thing. Sure, some of this info could go into the main text blurb - but I've found that it doesn't really allow for much text before it becomes cut off. Maybe just adding more to the character limit would suffice.

- Another thing regarding the text boxes in the profile: When typing text it won't tell you when you've gone over the character limit. So you'll assume the text is there until you look back at your profile and realise that part of what you've written is cut off. Maybe we could have an indicator while typing that we've reached the limit.

The first thing I really want is the ability to totaly rebind all the keyboard commands.

Also the ability to set the alpha on inactive (and active) windows would be nice.

Something better then pulldown menus to select things like who you want to track, landmarks, and texturesis needed badly. Something that takes into account the way you have them organized in your inventory would be helpful.

Names for the people dots on the map, maybe names floating next to the dots or maybe a pop up if you hover the mouse over them would be a really nice feature.

Since most commands are ctrl-something, make all commands control-something then any non meta charater could go strait to the chat command line eliminating the need to type enter before you talk every time.
or better yet, make the chat line more of a command line, make it so anything type in goes to the chat unless it has an escape character like /, ie /sit, /wave, /quit etc

A chat line stack would be nice too, ie just press up to get the last line you typed.

It would be nice if there was a way to IM someone from the chat line area. A possible syntax might be /im hiro yamamoto <message>.
Aliases could help with that too for people with long names/alias hiro yamamoto hiroy then just /im hiroy <message>. A /reply to respond to the last IM would also work here.

Personally i would just take the "more > >" buttons out altogether and just always show all the info. At least default it to the last way you had it. its annoying to have to press more > > in the edit window everytime i log in

It would be nice if the UI was as customizeable as everything else in SL. Something like the Custom XML UI in Everquest would be a great thing to mess with (and possibly give the ability to sell these skins in game)

Sounds in the ui are not consistant, for instance when you sound of the inventory being opened is different from its close sound, the map window has the same open and close sound as the inventory open, and the chat history has the same open sound but no close sound.

Also forgot to add this into my last post. Its another UI inconsitantcy.

Some windows open and close with the same key command. but some windows you can't close with the same command you opened it.

Like the inventory, press control-i to open and control-i to sloce when you're done.

with the Find window you press control-f to open and hit it again and nothing happens.