SteveJackhammer

Could we add a search box to the Location list? I'm often looking for a specific location, typically a friend's room, and all I can do is search up and down the list, squinting at the tiny font, cursing the choice of grey font color for the users name against a slightly different grey background. A partial text search box would be hugely helpful.

More use of fly-outs. Consider the clothes button. Yes, it should be a bigger symmetrical icon and so on and so forth, as I've indicated before. Put that aside. I like the way the individual clothes on/off buttons fly out from behind when clicked. Great way to save space. And those flyout buttons are big symmetrical squares! 1. Apply the same to Take Off All and Put On All. Right now they are tiny grey buttons. Make them big square buttons and add them to the main clothing button list (always at the beginning, Take Off on top and Put On below it). Now all the clothing buttons are the same. 2. Remove all the Dance and Rest Position (idle #, sit #, and so on) buttons and replace with Dance and Rest. Clicking on Dance causes a menu of Dance buttons to fly out as with the Clothes button. Likewise Rest causes a flyout of buttons for Idle and Sit and so on. Simplifies the overall screen, hides buttons from view until they are needed, is intuitive, and so on. You could even consider a menu tree approach: Rest --> Idle --> Idle #1, Idle #2... Rest --> Sit --> Sit #1, Sit #2... Dance --> Slow --> Slow 1, Slow 2, Slow 3... Dance --> Fast --> Fast 1, Fast 2, Fast 3... Instead of, or in addition to, a menu scheme, you could also decorate the specific Dance buttons (possible now that they are big squares/circles instead of tiny grey squares) with symbols to help with selection. How about a row of one to three exclamation marks ("!") along the top of the button indicate the relative speed of the dance? Then you wouldn't really need a menu for that categorization (reserve the menu for some other way to organize dances if it makes sense to).

Maybe some new navigation buttons: * Stop: Along with Run and Walk. The Stop button causes the character to stop walking or running immediately. * Rotate Left / Rotate Right: Clicking it causes the character to change facing by 20 degrees (or 15 or 30, it's negotiable) in the indicated direction. Great to help line up with other characters, with objects, or even to make the character face the action instead of standing facing a palm tree or a wall. Bonus Points: Option to tie the facing to camera direction. If the user spins the character-centered camera (F6), the avatar turns to match the direction. Might make everyone look like spinning lunatics on the screen, so the feature might be good for laugh value.

Continuing with UI issues to consider. This isn''t an action game, but it does demand navigation through a virtual space, turning corners, avoiding obstacles, changing facing, and so on. With that in mind, it has to be said that the button elements are far too small, at least on higher resolution screens, and they are shaped less than optimally. I'm trying to navigate on the screen, and decide to switch to Run from Walk. Because there is no keyboard shortcut for this, I need to move my mouse (and so my eyes) to the far side of the screen where the buttons are). The buttons are a uniform grey, so I can't just aim for a particular splash of colour. To find the correct button, I have to read words (no icons) and put the mouse point on a small thin rectangular space (not a larger easy-to-hit circle or square). If I miss, I hit one of the idle or dance buttons, because those thin grey buttons are also jammed up against the Run and Walk buttons with only a small margin between them. I'm doing all this mouse tracking and positioning far away from where the action is happening, and my character plows into a wall or falls off an edge without me knowing. Make the buttons larger, symmetric, colour-coded and icon-decorated. Separate them. Put Run and Walk at the top center or bottom center so that when my eye goes there, the distance from the core action is much smaller. Keep those buttons far away from a separate Dance cluster and a different Idle cluster.

That font used in the tab headers is almost illegible for me. For example, the tabs "World" and "Local" at the top of the chat widget. It's fine for words I know like "World" and "Local", but when it's a person's name rendered in that font, I can often not make heads or tails of the letters. Consider switching to the clean sans-serif font used elsewhere in the UI.

If they don't already exist, add a keyboard toggle to switch between walking and running. Use the mouse to switch is tricky (damn tiny buttons!) and while messing around with it, the avatar has run into a wall or off a ledge.

Another small one. Buttons with English words in them are a strange choice for a UI that is clearly used world-wide. Visually pleasing flat-style icons would probably do a lot to freshen up the look and feel of the UI, and also improve the user experience for everyone. (I should amend this with noting that there are in fact icons beside the word labels, but they are small and crowded out by the words. Just the icon is fine. Maybe a floating tooltip with the words you still want words.)

A history feature would be nice. Most recently visited rooms. Most recently opened profiles. That sort of thing. As a user, I naturally think in terms of browsers, and browsers use histories to help users manage the data they are viewing.

Don't be quick to close windows when switching rooms. I might have a profile open, and then I switch to a different room, and the profile window has closed. It is not clear why that would be closed (unlike the Local chat which ought to be cleared when the room changes). As a user, I would expect that autonomous UI actions happen only when they are actually necessary, otherwise the UI ought to defer to me on when to manipulate UI elements.

Use the chat dialog as a unified alert window. So as user responses in World, Local, and Private appear and scroll in the chat window, inject other alerts as well. In particular, things like a friend request or a partner request can put a line in the chat like "System: You just received a partner request from [username]". As a user, I want to be aware of external events while focusing on a chat, and not miss the opportunity to respond to these events in a timely fashion. Ideally I can act on the event directly in the window, like a right-click and a context menu with "Accept request" "Reject request" options.

[I had these on another forum, but I think discussion there is focused on more important "big picture" issues, and my issues are more along the lines tweaks. The "As a user..." bits will sound familiar to the developers if they use the Agile model for software development.] Have the name of the location displayed prominently somewhere on the User Interface. As a user, I want to be able to know where I am without opening the Locations menu and looking for the blue-highlighted entry in the shared worlds list.

Specific and (probably) small UI changes that might be impactful

Staying on topic, featured rooms would be great. Might goose the user community to start generating more content. With enough content, featured rooms could even be categorized as in "Famous Movie Locations" and "Real-World Places" and "Imaginary Castles" and so on. I've seen people recreate things as pedestrian as a real-world subway station (from street level down to the platform) in great detail (ticket booths, snack shop, signage, etc), and they were fascinating to walk through. They became meeting places in of themselves (not in 3dx but another famous 3d shared world game which will go unnamed). "Where will I find you?" "Come to the Overlook Hotel later." "OK, see you there. I'll bring the axe." "Good..wait, what?" "Here's Johnny!"

I love Overlook Hotel! Spooky mirror face! Your effort shows (and is appreciated). Next time I'm there, I will make sure you know.

They can walk and chew gum at the same time. And with software, fixing a bug is often a question of choosing among different approaches. The right choice might be informed by new feature development. Fixing all the bugs first might result in fixing some of them again when the new development starts after, since it turns out that the bug fix is incompatible with the new work. Bug fixing and new development happens on different branches but in parallel, so the developers can merge bug fix code into new development code at regular intervals and make certain things are aligning. (If you're not a software developer, and are curious, look up "software management" to learn how software is developed using multiple branches that are synchronized at intervals. All software management systems, like Git, are organized around working on multiple branches at the same time.)

Add the name of the current location to the screen somewhere, so I don't need to go into the location list and scroll to see which is highlighted. Maybe it's there and I missed it, but something simple like that shouldn't be easily missed. I would put that in the chat window border title, since a fair amount of time is spent looking at the chat, but a separate screen element is OK too. I get that the location names can vary widely in size, and can have oddball characters, so might not be so straightforward.

Native English speaker here, so this doesn't get in my way of understanding what the buttons on the screen are for, but is there a reason that the buttons are text buttons in English? Could the location button be a globe? The edit character button a human stick figure? Chat a mouth icon? The buttons could be a uniform size and shape, scale for easy viewability, have subtle backgrounds to make the simple icons pop, and be more universally understood. It would certainly make the UI feel more modern.

Can we unify the updates and messages into a single stream? Right now, world/local/private messages appear in the chat window, but an alert that someone wants to partner you or friend you appears elsewhere, and an alert that the room is closing appears in the center. I have to scan around to make sure I don't miss anything (and I do tend to miss those friend/pose alerts!). Maybe make it so a "Person123 wants to partner with you" message appears inline with the ongoing message stream in the chat window. Maybe the interaction has to remain somewhere else (buttons might not be possible in the chat window) but at least status changes and action alerts wouldn't get missed while deep in a chat. I'd see that coloured message in the dialog stream, and pop down to where the action button is to respond to it.

It's just that I've seen profiles with people typing out names of their significant others, sometimes 5 or 6 of them. My idea was to make that more structured and consistent, and move the manual listing from the profile description to its own tab. For people who make the effort to type out the names, the work is now easier. For people who would like to but find the effort too much, now they can. What I didn't appreciate was that even typing out the names was an opening to harassment by others, and that's a shame. If that's the case, and I believe you when you say it is, then let this trial balloon go down like the Hindenburg, lol. Oh, the humanity! Thanks for explaining why the idea would not work.

How about a more flexible friend system? We have friend lists that are private, and a single-slot spouse entry. Instead, expose the friend list in the publicly accessible profile in its own tab right after Gifts. Zero or more friends are displayed on that tab for people perusing the profile. The user can flag each entry in the main friend list as private (default) or public (appears on the profile-accessible list). And each line gets a small text field to write in the nature of the relationship (husband, wife, wife #1, wife#2,, boss, bff, arch enemy, whatever). Profiles of the friends can be reached, but there is no private messaging option -- we don't want our friend lists being used for spamming or harassment.