Caleb Booker

This is the third in a series dedicated to answering two questions: Why are virtual worlds a good alternative to existing technologies? How can one best get a Return On Investment (ROI) from virtual world ventures? There is now an archive page for past entries. Feel free to explore the topics that appear there and email me if you feel that there is a topic that needs to be covered. Forword This continues the short run of “stuff you need to know” background articles, this time leaning very much toward a “how-to”. I realized in researching this section that all I really needed to post was the story of why the Clever Zebra orientation took the form it did. In so doing, hopefully I’ll be able to cover most of the things we discovered in our explorations.

NOTE: while I have decided to begin compiling information for the purposes of a book on Return on Investment in Virtual Worlds, the off-the-cuff format is going to stay. Largely, the series continues as a way of my putting these thoughts together in a cohesive format. Excessive detail will be omitted in favor of comprehensibility.

So as usual, please forgive my lack of specific references. This is just a collection of things I remember having studied, experienced or tested in the past, so do add comments if I’ve missed something or if you’ve written something that applies!

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Does It Matter How We Bring People In?

I had first started designing Clever Zebra’s new user orientation experience for the vBusiness Expo. We were looking at bringing a large number of executives into Second Life, many of whom had never even been in a virtual world at all.

Some might not really see this as a big deal. Just tell them to create an account and log in, and we’ll send them an email with a SLurl, right?

Ah… no. So very much no.

As we had seen running dozens of other events, new users have a very difficult time getting used to Second Life. It has many features they won’t need, and controls that only become intuitive after they’ve gone through lots and lots of reading. Existing orientation experiences came with many potential pitfalls as well. For instance:

The above picture is from Linden Lab’s original Orientation Island. You wander around looking for little pedestals you can click to get notecard instructions from, all the while wondering what the point of a virtual world is if you have to just read a book anyhow. Be careful about lag, or you might blow past those signs and get lost in the valley behind!

Speaking of valleys, this is actually part of the orientation! That’s right, new users fresh to the experience are expected to be able to fight lag, control speed, not accidentally get turned around, and get themselves over to a pavilion on the other side. A pavilion with a roof, by the way, giving new users yet another opportunity to feel like they did something wrong.

At the end of the experience, if they make it that far, new users finish with very little idea of where to go next.

This was not going to work for us. If we wanted to bring people in to engage in our experience, we needed to design an orientation that was going to get them there!

I’ve broken it all down into seven basic steps:

• Step 1: What Are Our Priorities?
• Step 2: Layout
• Step 3: Instruction Panel Design
• Step 4: The Payoff
• Step 5: Help Staff
• Step 6: Double-Check For Gotchas!
• Step 7: The VIP Treatment

Step 1: What Are Our Priorities?

In a sense, this is a trick question. We knew why we wanted people to come into Second Life: so they can interact with our brand, the brands of our sponsors, experience the technology for themselves, and attend some great presentations. Those are our priorities, but none of those things help us in creating a really excellent orientation experience.

The real question: What are our guest’s priorities?

Now we’re getting somewhere! If we think in terms of what our guests need, we have a shot at creating something that works. For running events, we came up with:

• It should be fast
• And easy
• Very little reading
• No extras
• Everything should be just “obvious”
• I should end up where I’m supposed to be
• I should be allowed to make a few mistakes
• I should be able to just blow through it if I’m late

That was our list, but yours might be different. Virtual Ability’s orientation, for instance, was just a brilliant piece of work. Thorough, gorgeous, and easy to understand, it’s actually one of my favorite orientation experiences in Second Life.

The difference, however, is in their guests’s priorities. New users plan to take over an hour to complete their orientation, with the goal not of reaching a specific event but simply of learning Second Life. For that set of priorities, what they did was a much better fit.

For our events, however, I’d have hated to send all of our guests through something that long. Our guests are always pressed for time, and they’re extremely results-oriented. They came here to hear a specific speaker or go to a specific meeting, not to learn Second Life.

Here are some questions you can ask to create your own priority list:

• What are our guests here to do?
• How much time will our engagement experience take?
• How much time will the average guest have to play around in Second Life outside of our experience?
• How much reading are our guests willing to do?
• Are there extras our guests will appreciate learning about?
• Are there extras we can cut out to make this all shorter?

Step 2: Layout

Figuring out exactly how people are going to walk through your experience deserves more thought than most seem to give it. Allow me to pick on another Linden Lab orientation experience, “Orientation Stations – in the Castle“:

I remember finding this place when I was a newer user trying to figure things out that I had missed, and I still remember how frustrated I was. In watching new users go through the experience since, I think I’ve figured out why. Let’s do a quick list:

1. Long climbs up ramps need railings. New users often have a very difficult time going directly toward what they’re aiming at, and there’s nothing more frustrating than slipping off near the top and having to start all over.
2. Do not expect new users to just fly there! The platforms are tricky to land on even for experienced users. This goes double for the impossible-to-aim “jumping” function in SL.
3. Do not make them do all that work just to arrive in an empty building!
4. If you do put pictures up when there haven’t been pictures anywhere else, make them clickable.
5. On stairs: Narrow + Steep + Ceiling + No Railings = No! Especially when none of the basements have anything in them!
6. On exits: every orientation needs one, or you’re leaving the new user stranded in your orientation prison!

On the opposite side of the spectrum there’s Manpower’s orientation:

Very open-concept! When I was going through the slideshow for the crew, this got some very positive reactions from a few who had seen example after example of claustrophobic spaces. On testing, however, we noticed that new users tended to randomly wander around the space, often getting turned around or missing stations that they would have liked to see.

Here’s our current solution:

The landing point is at the bottom-left, and while there’s an exit away from the rest of the orientation we tend to rope it off when we expect guests. It’s just a straight line directly to the venue, with low walls on either side of the path and high invisible walls around the seating area. (The invisible walls themselves are curved so if someone is really determined to walk into the water they can!)

During the expo this was actually slightly longer, but the concept was the same: a straight line directly from the landing point to the venue, with one slight bend at one point due to geographic issues. We also tried to keep ramps to a bare minimum, as new users get pretty stressed when they inexplicably start going faster or slower.

Most importantly: zero steps, and zero pitfalls!

What about circular layouts?

Both Accenture and NMC use circular layouts for their orientation spaces:

These aren’t bad ways to go if space is limited and/or you have a higher number of panels to go through than we do. The only real reason we shied away from this was that our guests tend to be very linear thinkers and we wanted to show that this was all “leading somewhere”, but depending on your application this might be the preferred design for you.

Step 3: Instruction Panel Design

There are many, many ways to display instructions in a virtual world. Here are just a few:

Some you’ll see and immediately respond to, while others will seem inexplicably bad. Remember, though, that every one of these was designed with their specific guests in mind. The Public Works Island orientation, for instance, is just a little cobblestone path with gray panels that say “CLICK HERE”. In other settings I’d say that this is horrible, but their target audience is engineers who want detailed instructions. Notecards are absolutely the perfect way to go for them, and they’ll appreciate it.

No matter which design you select, however, remember that a virtual space is not optimized for reading text. That’s what we have web browsers for. In a 3D space only experienced users are accustomed to adjusting the camera angle just right – everybody else is forced to read the text at an odd angle and off-center of their display. (I kept the avatar in the pictures for Accenture and The Second House to illustrate. See above.)

Having said that, we’re kind of stuck with displaying some text. Some day when I have some more time and a bigger budget I’ll design a sensor-activated streaming video clip walkway, but until then we have to force people to read in this most disagreeable set of circumstances.

Since that’s the case, there are some general rules:

1. Fonts should be easy to read.
2. Sentences should be as brief as possible.
3. Don’t tell when you can show – use pictures!
4. Consistency, consistency, consistency!

This last point is often missed. Keep the size, shape and color of the panels consistent! This helps the pattern-matching part of the brain lock on to each letter, word and sentence much more easily, as well as lend a sense of familiarity. Comfortable guests learn faster and enjoy themselves more, so keep this in mind if you come up with a creative idea for a panel that might break your pattern.

Here’s what we’ve come up with at Zebra HQ. (Click images for full size, opens in another window.)

Some quick notes here:

• An avatar model “demonstrating” everything felt pretty critical.
• We used the same avatar model for all panels. At one point when we realized we needed more poses, I went on a bit of an epic shopping quest to re-create the exact avatar as the guy who had originally helped us out had used. Consistency is key.
• The background pattern behind the model stayed consistent as well.
• We were able to get away with a slightly smaller font by making it a black sans-serif on a white background. You’ll notice that even in my shrunken 800×600 panned back medium-quality JPG, you can still read it. There is no clearer text format unless you’re planning on a lot of text (like a book), at which point you do want off-white background and should strongly consider serifed fonts.
• The Clever Zebra logo is black and white, so without official company colors we had free reign for what we wanted to do. The calming blue selected here (and associated dark corners and faded center) was the result of much fussing over color palettes which, as you can imagine, made us feel like manly men.
• Having a large, blank and mostly featureless background for the instructions was important. Distracting bits like overhanging lights and detailed “supports” for the sign were removed to make it that much easier to concentrate on the matter at hand.
• We knew it had to be the same number of “steps” every time (remember consistency!), so we chose four as we figured it was the maximum we could do without intimidating anyone.
• The whole thing can be viewed comfortably without zooming. This is important, as new users don’t really know how to zoom yet!
• The first panel is absurdly simple to establish the notion that they’re all going to be this easy. No special effort is made to highlight the “hard ones” later, so people remain relaxed and just focus on what they’re doing.
• We didn’t offer instructions for sitting, instead making it so that you just left-click on a seat and you’re instantly sitting. Again, not here to teach skills, just here to get them participating.
• We don’t honestly expect new users to fully grasp the media controls right away. Even at events with experienced users, we tend to have to give the instructions live via voice and then do lots of private message follow-up with people. Still, it’s worth posting as sometimes people do get it.

As stated before, that’s just us. You may find other solutions given your purpose.

Step 4: The Payoff

Your orientation experience should end where your real experience begins. In our case, that means an events venue.

For others, it varies. The following are possible exit points for your orientation:

• Event venue
• Social space
• Games area
• Creative and entertaining branded space
• Teleports to your other builds

The following, while all seeming like good ideas, are NOT themselves proper exits:

• Advanced tutorials (unless they’re on the other side of your branded experience)
• Stacks of freebies (neat, but not a destination or an experience)
• Teleports to random places having nothing to do with you (why did you bring them in in the first place?)

Notes on Flight and Avatar Customization

In all of the orientation spaces I’ve ever seen, only the Virtual Ability build had a flight tutorial that was any good. This is very hard to pull off without new users flying themselves far, far away from your orientation never to return. If you can avoid it, do so.

As far as avatar customization goes, this can be done right and can be done very, very wrong. If you feel it’s absolutely necessary, I recommend handing out freebie avatars (via intuitive left-click object givers please!) and going through the tutorial for drag-dropping folders onto oneself.

The moment you get any more detailed with customization you’ll have a bunch of avatars standing around with their arms out, half-naked, toying with sliders for anywhere between five minutes to an hour. This may not matter if your experience isn’t time-sensitive and you expect your guests to be logging in for the first time looking for fun. If they’re logging in to get something specific done, however, you’ve just caused them to waste a large amount of time and, if they don’t have the talent for getting sliders right, you’ve also frustrated them. They may actually blame themselves for that but either way, if the do finally make it to your experience, they’ll be in less of a good mood than they might have been.

Step 5: Help Staff

There are some situations that don’t require a live staff, but there are none that wouldn’t be improved by one. If it’s at all within the realm of possibility, have helpers available at times when you expect guests will be arriving. It’s the difference between telling your customers “press 1 for this, 2 for that” and being able to just “dial 0 for an operator”.

While extensive training isn’t necessary, there are some basic things your staff needs to keep in mind:

• Be polite, obviously.
• Go out of your way to welcome everyone and introduce yourself.
• Put away the dominatrix avatar with the *censored* particle effect for now, would you dear?
• Watch your guests and ask if they need help if they’ve paused at one spot for too long.
• When walking people through settings, refer to the left/right hand of the window at the top/bottom. If it’s a specific menu item, tell them not only where the menu is but how to open it and how far down the important item is.

With a live staff you can get away with a much shorter orientation as well. Languagelab, for instance, used to be a very large and involved orientation space but also always had live staff there to greet newcomers. Their orientation space is now very tiny compared to most, simply because they don’t need it – in an ESL setting it’s easier to just have a live attendant help people out.

Live staff also help you work around a more elaborate design. Take The Shelter for instance.

The place is pretty chaotic, even by Second Life standards. That doesn’t matter though because they have such a fantastic staff of volunteers to help new people along and keep everyone having a good time. I’m not saying that staff are a magic bullet, but in some cases they can turn a potential disaster into a real winner.

Step 6: Double-Check For Gotchas!

You’re almost done, but now it’s time to make sure that you haven’t accidentally left something that needs attending to. I’m going to include screenshots of every single one of these things for two reasons: so you can see the problem itself, and to illustrate that they all do happen even when brilliant people are behind the orientation space.

Make sure there are railings Check the length Your landing point needs to be foolproof Compensate for gaps in your walkway Control litter (auto-return) Try not to finish at a dead end

Step 7: The VIP Treatment

If you’re planning on bringing in speakers or specific clients, you should be giving them the VIP treatment. This means:

1. Be on the phone with them helping them fill out the web forms to get an account.
2. Help them download/install the software.
3. Once logged in, add each other as a “friend”.
4. If they’re not already in your orientation space, offer them a teleport. Give them verbal instructions on what to expect.
5. Get them using in-world voice technology, hang up the phone.
6. Walk through every orientation panel with them.
7. Help them customize their avatar and go shopping. Ideally, hand them a folder containing a pre-made avatar just for them.

I’d strongly recommend doing this a few days before any kind of scheduled event or meeting, ideally a good solid week before. Expect delays and having to reschedule at least once. Be prepared for everything to go wrong, and have backup plans at the ready. Make sure they allow an hour “depending on how many questions you may have.”

The result is a far more positive and productive experience for your guest when the time comes. Meetings will be about the subject at hand rather than whether their hair is on straight, they’ll be able to attend and interact at lectures with ease, and may even take the time between your tour and the actual event to discover some fun things to do by themselves.

This is the ideal result of a VIP orientation: a new frequent visitor, or even permanent resident, of the virtual world. If they become really engaged and get a lot out of the experience in the years that follow, they will always remember that it was you who brought them in.

Conclusions

Clearly the instructions above only apply in a literal fashion to Second Life, but you may find them a useful reference when working in other platforms.

One could argue that if a virtual world is put together properly there’s no real need for an orientation experience at all. This perspective usually comes from the world of games (specifically MMOGs), where you’re often dropped right into the action and learn as you go.

The difference, of course, is that in a MMOG people have a pre-conceived purpose. They find out what they have to do or where they need to go, and then pick up the skills for getting the job done along the way.

In a sense, that’s the cheat we use over at Zebra HQ. We cover walking, typing in chat, zooming the camera, and playing video. The reason we don’t have to go any further is because our guests have arrived for a specific purpose, and it’s that purpose we’ve built to accommodate.

By extension, so many orientation spaces go wrong because Second Life itself doesn’t have “a purpose”. It’s so open-ended that many start tossing out whatever instructions they think people will enjoy knowing, without a clear sense of what the priorities should be. Hopefully this will help you avoid that trap.

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Again, this entire post is off the top of my head. If I’ve missed something or if you’ve written something that can expand on these points, feel free to add a link in the comments.

Posted on February 10th, 2009 under ROI, business, new media, virtual worlds. Tags: business, new media, orientation, ROI, virtual worlds. RSS 2.0 feed. Leave a response, or trackback.