Adult Content Controls for Second Life

Description:

The lifeblood of Second Life was the incredible diversity of its user-generated content. As Second Life strove to expand its user base, richer and more fine-grained tools were needed to control what user could see, hear, and find. Linden Lab set out to create policies and tools geared towards cleanly labeling adult content and general content.

The permission systems and virtual economy were based on virtual land ownership. As the Design Lead for Land, I worked with the land owners and domain experts to define the adult content policies, understand and prototype the tools, highlight the implications, and drive the implementation. The UI changes touched every corner of the product including Land information, Preferences, Search, the World Map, and new teleport errors related to maturity rating.

This cross-organization effort required iterative coordinated effort to get the policies, tools, and outbound communication correct and synchronized. Since these changes would impact the Second Life economy via user buying behavior, proposals were vetted with a wide range of users including influential virtual land owners prior to full-scale release.