Summary 

This article outlines some areas for consideration when designing forms on the web. Most people think that the biggest thing to consider is if they should have a single page form or a multiple page form. However you should be asking if you should keep, cut postpone or explain. By evaluating you form based on these four point’s you can have a big impact on the project. You can also try look at the clarity of requirements. One company did this by changing the word “register” to “continue” and saw an increase in sales by 300 million dollars a year.  You can cut down requirements by converting fields to optional with an indicator. 

As I said in a previous article people are lazy and do not want to put in more effort than is needed. This is never as true as it is for online forms. People do not want to think to hard about the information they are inputing and they want to put in the least amount needed to complete the job. There are a ton of competitors online and you don’t have the person to person contact for help so your design has to be easy to interact with so users don’t abandon the task. 

A great book to check out for more on this subject is Web Form Design - Filling in the Blanks, by Luke Wroblewski. 

Outside of statistics wonks and intellectual masochists (is there really a difference?), not many people get excited when the words “metrics” or “analytics” enter into a discussion.  Yet, despite their lack of appeal, metrics are the lifeblood of any serious effort to build better products and services.  This applies just as much to virtual worlds as it does to anything else, perhaps even more-so. 

Right now our metrics tools are quite crude when it comes to Opensim.  The system knows how many users are in a region, and with some extra effort, its possible to pull together a reasonable snapshot of how many users are logged into a grid.  Beyond that (to my knowledge) there are no tools which can provide much in the way of data which world creators can make real use of.

The easier it can be made to collect meaningful data about how users interact with the worlds we build, the better we will become at building worlds users flock to.  Without metrics we’re just stabbing around in the dark.

I’ve been refreshing my websites lately and putting in fresh analytics. There are great analytics tools out there for the fully functional website, but for the basic data I’m looking for Google Analytics gets the job done nicely and for a price you can’t beat.

But apparently Google Analytics has gone into advanced stages of Alzheimers…

Every time I go to www.google.com/analytics Google greats me like the guy from the movie Memento who can’t create new memories - explaining to me all the things its product has to offer as if I hadn’t just been here every day in the last week. This could be forgiven if this was a security/privacy thing demanding you to login each time like Gmail does. But Google doesn’t get any points for this because if you’re already logged into your Google account then clicking the “Sign-In” button takes you directly to your analytics dashboard without signing in.

What the hell Google?! You can’t check that I’m already logged in and take me there?

I know my context - I’m here to see how my sites are doing and if/how I can make them better. YOU know my context because you already know it’s ME and what I’m tracking. So why are you just dumping your self-promotion on me again? Especially if I’ve ALREADY BOUGHT INTO IT!

If you know who your user is, if you know what he came to your site to see and if you already have that information available - just show it to him! Don’t just stand there going “oooo look how shiny!” on something I already have.

And if - for whatever reason - you need to have this separate step - then why not make the information you show useful to me? Don’t show me random features, show me specific features that I’m not using and could benefit from. Give me a peak of data I haven’t seen and what it could do for me. Make me buy into something new, don’t re-sell me what I already have.

“User experience design is not limited to the confines of the computer. It doesn’t even need a screen,” argues Bill DeRouchey, director of interaction design at Ziba Design. “User experience is any interaction with any product, any artifact, any system.”

via

What if we limited the inventory you could access anywhere to just nine items? 

Heresy, I know. 

Second Life and Opensim have always offered unlimited access to a user’s inventory.  Every script, texture, piece of clothing, and trinket is given an equal treatment and is available for immediate use.  This may seem like a convenient idea, after all it lets you have access to everything, no matter what you’re doing or where you are.

So what’s the problem? The problem is that it lets you have access to everything, no matter what you’re doing or where you are.  As any experienced user will tell you, a bloated inventory full of hundreds if not thousands of items is about as inevitable as death or taxes. Without constant upkeep, the inventory becomes a thicket of content, the vast majority rarely used.  Not only does this system discourage experienced users, it most likely confuses the prims out of new users who are just trying to wrap their heads around the blizzard of other novel concepts SL/Opensim throws their way. 

So why not create an intentional limit for our own sanity?  Nine items is about the maximum that a human brain can focus on at any one time, so it seems like a nice number to limit the “active inventory”.  This active inventory wouldn’t count worn clothes or attachments against your nine-slot limit, but anything else would.  You could still access the rest of you inventory, but it would either be something you had to open a secondary window to access, or something you could only access from a in-world terminal.

To be sure, this is not a system that would work well for everyone, and it falls under the same category of modifications as my earlier rant on gamification.  However, I believe it is something worth experimenting with in a non-mandatory way.  It may ease the pains of day-to-day inventory use and make it easier for new users to get a grip on the whole system.

I await the pitchfork-wielding mob.

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