Wagner James Au / New World Notes

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Are You Thankful for Second Life’s Sleek New Search User Interface?

I just gave this a quick spin (watch above):

Today we’re excited to announce that we’ve updated the look of our inworld and web-side Search feature to bring it more in line with the look and feel of our viewer and the direction that that rest of our web properties will be going… Our goal was to clean up the interface and provide a more streamlined and user friendly Search feature that maintained all the functionality that we’ve all come to expect and rely upon. Helpful tool tips will guide you in getting the most functionality out of your searches, and will update as we add more options for more sophisticated searches.

The user interface is definitely prettier! As for the user experience… well, you can watch above and make your own judgements. I ran it on a gamer laptop that plays the new AAA Deathloop game beautifully and with very little performance issues. Worth bearing in mind that Google came to dominate the search engine market back in olden times (by which I mean 2000) not because it was pretty but because it was ruthlessly streamlined to give the user relevant results as quickly as possible.

Second Life search viewer UI

Your own mileage, as they say, may vary! Report your own results below.

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6 responses to “Are You Thankful for Second Life’s Sleek New Search User Interface?”

  1. camilia fid3lis nee Patchouli Woollahra Avatar
    camilia fid3lis nee Patchouli Woollahra

    A good search engine should be initially streamlined, but offer plenty of additional ways to hang your query in specific ways. This version goes pretty far in that regard, but don’t expect anything fancy like Boolean searches (like anybody younger even remembers what those are anymore.)

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  2. Summer Haas Avatar
    Summer Haas

    All I want is a button that blocks AFK and Escort results.

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  3. SamaarOmariBaptiste Avatar
    SamaarOmariBaptiste

    Hate it. Period.

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  4. David D. Avatar
    David D.

    It feels good, but only LL will be able to tell whether it really helps or not. In my field of higher education, there is a want to make lots of pretty videos and web pages because people equate user experience with knowledge access and will help with developing competence. There are studies that say that the look and feel have nothing to do ultimately with the learning. Usability (and universal design), information results, and presentation are all different things, and while they can impact one another, you can have a crap design with all the right bits of info which people are just fine consuming, and you can have really pretty things that still have terrible text output. And, even if you have both, if the engine doesn’t let people get what they want, it can be as advanced and clean as it wants; it is still a crappy search engine.
    The UX is good and is more attractive. Now put some substance behind the change and you’ll have good universal design.

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  5. Henri Beauchamp Avatar
    Henri Beauchamp

    “The user interface is definitely prettier!”
    I beg to differ: I hate the flat look, the huge fonts, the cumbersome results (that also glitch for the first result, when the window is made narrow enough; the input field then truncates the upper result), the fact that you need to scroll and scroll and scroll and scroll again just to see the first few results, etc, etc…
    But what bothers me most, as a viewer developer, is that the whole form is JavaScript-dependent and that the search URL it composes is not any more based on simple URL parameters substitutions, meaning that if you want to query the new SL search engine with a simple category/query terms couple, you cannot no more do it short of duplicating the JavaScript code used to compose the search URL…

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  6. Zia Avatar
    Zia

    I really don’t like it. For one they removed the population counter. Which was useful to see what sims were active and worth checking out at a glance. The other issue I have with it is that they are hiding the sim summary behind a mouse click which is just a terrible design. I should be able to browse at a glance after I search. Not be forced to single click each link to see what it is. I am not sure what the thought process was there but making the user do more work isn’t exactly a great design philosophy.
    Furthermore the chunky monochromatic design looks basic frankly. And not in a good way. More like a web design 101 first project sort of feel. It feels uninspired and slapdash. The use of space is just weird. This is a definite step down. Nothing was added to the experience but plenty was removed.

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