Usability and Virtual World Design
by azwaldo on Apr.16, 2009, under design, education, opensim, secondlife, usability, virtualworlds
Have you ever teleported to a Second Life® location just to spend a lot of time trying to figure out where to go next, what you are supposed to do, or where you should point the camera? Suppose you arrive at a location and know you are in the right place. How long are you willing to look, to find what you were after? Five minutes? Ten?
How often have you teleported away before finding it, or left thinking you probably missed something you were supposed to see? Such experiences indicate a challenge for instructional design.
And, we’ve seen these problems before. Just “open in browser” to jump back into the proving ground.
“The only certain trend on the Internet and WWW is that there are no trends on the Internet.”
Jakob Nielson, in 1995
Sound familiar? The first decade of the Internet saw many lessons emerge from web page design:
- Hyperlinks should be grouped, but not at the bottom of the page
- one style of text does not work everywhere, but some font/style choices are even worse than a page full of monospace
- and, a variety of visual content is appealing, but clutter does not communicate
If unfamiliar with the study of web design, one look through Nielson’s Alertbox posts and it becomes clear that there was much to consider when designing for the Internet. On the growing web, lesser designs were tolerated as new sites employed fresh options; and we selected the best designs, mouse-click by mouse-click.
Now we have Web 3-D.
What are the design trends in the metaverse? If a pattern exists in labeling content like streaming media, I cannot think of it. If a trend has emerged for the design of navigation cues, I have not seen it. What types of content require rapid recognition or consumption? What examples demonstrate the most effective designs?
Is it new to consider virtual world design as quite similar to designing for the web? (It is to me.) To see the parallel, just work your way up from the earliest posts by Nielson. One article, Top Ten Mistakes in Web Design (1996), was later reprised in ‘99, ‘02, ‘03, and ‘05. Open any one and you might find yourself recalling a particularly wonky experience in world. Can VW design be informed by the study of usability in early web page design? In the next few posts, I plan to investigate further.
You are welcome to join the fray.
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April 18th, 2009 on 7:59 pm
Timely post.
It seems a big thing is the the lack of easy search in 3D environments. I was on a health sim the other week looking for a particular build on the site and could not find it because all the stuff on the site was sort of strewn about without a whole lot of regard to arrangement and no way to search for the particular build I was looking for.
Also this may seem heresy, but I think many builds are bigger than they really need to be perhaps in the belief that this adds to the immersivity (sp) experience, but sometimes it is a hindrance. Flying through a huge molecule or body part may be fun, but there I times when I want to bring the object down to size where I can say rotate the whole thing without having to fly around.
Does this make sense or did I just get up on the wrong side of my unscripted bed this morning?
May 29th, 2009 on 1:54 pm
@Simone
Molecule size as an issue depends on what you are trying to convey. Yes, you can have a tiny molecule but you will probably lose a lot of detail and your size reduction strategy had better be clever or you won’t save many prims either. If you then give a copy of this small molecule to each student, the consequences can be severe. Of course, you can have a single prim sculpty, a simple static image or an animated gif with the molecule rotating or, if you prefer, a link to a web page running Jmol. Ultimately it is “horses for courses” as we Brits say. Personally I think there is an undeniable “wow” factor to a large molecule, plus the ability to annotate it legibly and explore it without advanced camera skills. Your mileage may vary.
April 18th, 2009 on 10:55 pm
Rather than look to the web for examples and guidance, the design principles used in 3D games for promoting and supporting navigation through 3D spaces might prove more useful
Lighting, visibility and placement of scenery can all be used to great effect. One limitation in SL is that few educators (I’d include myself here) have much experience in creating such spaces. Then when someone flies into the middle rather than the start of a space… the planning goes to pot anyway!
I did however try to use the environment and scenery as much as signposts to guide users through the SLOODLE demo course that I created some time ago.
I’d be interested to know if you think it works:
http://tinyurl.com/6pmomq to visit it inworld
or http://www.sloodle.org/moodle/course/view.php?id=42 to start on the accompanying web-site
(Even if you don’t actually follow the class… your opinion on the 3D layout would be of interest)
April 20th, 2009 on 4:24 pm
@Daniel I may have been there, already. If it is the space I am thinking about, I recall having the impression that real effort had been invested in the layout, that it had a user centered design. Still, I have made a note to return and will look with fresh eyes.
For now, I will stick with my plan. But, can you recommend a good source to start looking into game design principles?
@Simone
The first part of your comment raises a point that is near the top of my list. I consider this to be a “site navigation” issue.
Having already given it some thought, I plan to explore this issue in depth, and soon. I have seen reference to this many times in what I have read about VW design critique and criteria, and know of various sites where I can study this, but maybe you could please send to me a URL for the web page and a SLURL for the sim? a z w a l d o [ a t ] g m a i l [ d o t ] c o m (Or a link and a LM, if from within the grid.)
I wonder if the sim you referred to was developed piecemeal, over time. In that way, the need for site navigation would not have been clear from the start. Certainly a robust search feature could have provided a solution in the situation you describe. But, when real search arrives, will it depend on the developer naming objects deliberately, perhaps even providing metadata in the object description fields? Are you doing that now? I am going to start doing that now, right after I post this comment…
April 22nd, 2009 on 11:52 am
Hi Azwaldo,
you might well have been there! Thanks for noticing that the course was unavailable – a whoops at our end, fixed now.
I’d recommend grabbing a book on Level Design – there are a few to choose from, the one by Phil Co seems to come fairly well recommended. There will be a lot of irrelevant stuff in there (and probably a degree of bias towards first person shooter games) but a lot of the principles should apply to any 3D virtual space where you are trying to guide people through the space.
One of the ways a 3D space will differ from a web-page (thinking of your diagrams) as an example is that you can use textures, lighting, shadows, etc to guide the user visually in ways that would be rare to see on a web-page.
April 30th, 2009 on 6:41 am
Hey there Azwaldo…I wanted to bring this article to your attention…”Usability and Accessibility in 3D Web”, which discusses this subject in quite some depth. It adds another component to the discussion, that of accessibility, which is implied but not directly expressed so far in your ponderings…
https://gradient.it.uc3m.es/file-storage/view/publications%5C/uess07-rcg.pdf
Thanks for putting this discussion up on the web…I will be checking back to see how it progresses and occasionally put my own two cents worth in.
May 12th, 2009 on 5:18 pm
As an information architect I’ve begun some initial research into wayfinding and “catalogs” in virtual worlds, and would be interested in further work and discussion in this area. And FYI, the Information Architecture Institute hosts an island in Second Life to explore these and other topics.
http://fritillaria.blogspot.com/2007/05/wayfinding-in-second-life-ia-puzzle.html
http://fritillaria.blogspot.com/2007/03/ia-exercise-catalogs.html