Second Life Communication System Redesign

Description:

As Second Life’s active user base expanded, the evolutionary nature of the user experience was taking a toll on user retention. Our survey in November 2007 of 10,000 users who logged in to Second Life a few times but then never returned confirmed that our largest contributor to attrition was that “Second Life is hard to use.” A second survey of infrequent users further confirmed that the top desired improvement was to “Make Second Life easier to use.” We saw this as an opportunity to revamp and reorganize the client UI based on user research and design principles.

Previous experience and further studies drove our experience principles and prioritization of core features. The highest priority was a complete overhaul of the Communications system which included Local/Voice Chat, Notifications, IM, and Group Chat. The design team created a high-level IA mockup of functional regions which placed communications-related functionality along the bottom of the window.

I was responsible for the Notifications subsystem within the overall Communications system. The first step in redesigning Notifications was to understand the current set of possible notifications. I enumerated and affinity clustered the current notifications into a notifications map. I also created small user notification workflows for the states of the notification types. These activities established rough design patterns for similar notification types.

Using the notification map and the notification workflows, I created low-fidelity wireframes to ensure that high-priority workflows were addressed and that the Communications’ design team was synchronized on design direction. As we gained confidence in the design direction, I created higher-fidelity wireframes of a greater diversity of use cases. We used the mockups and other prototypes in usability studies, iterated the designs, and implemented the new Communications system in the application.

The new Communications system reduced attrition through enhanced user engagement measured by increased frendship requests and interactions with groups.