Filed under: Digital Adoption, Reviews by Digado

Yesterday the winners of the Dusan Writer Second Life interface Contest were announced live on Metanomics. After a short overview of all the contestants, the finalists and final winner are as follows:

First place: Rheta Shan
A well deserved winner, she got the viewer and presentation done down to the last details. As major improvements I’d list the snapshot feature, the loading bar, and the clear grouping of navigation elements at the top of the screen. Click on the image to see an interactive Flash version of Rheta’s proposal.

Second place: Jacek Antonelli
The second place was won over by Jacek’s thorough knowledge of the current Second Life viewer. Using her experience Jacek crafted a new interface with clear grouping of social/communication tools, scalable menus and a great make-over of the inventory system, solving a significant problem for most long-time users.

Third place: Roy Cassini (me!)
After writing extensively on Dazzle, and how the interface wasn’t solving the problems it could be solving, I had to put my money where my mouth was. I focussed on creating the interface more accessible to new users with an on-board tutorial, guiding new users through the first steps inside the virtual world.

Overall it was a fun experience to see some virtual world crowdsourcing in action, and some insights into the different perceptions on interaction design solutions for Second Life. I’d like to thank the entire jury (Ordinal Malaprop, Eristic Strangelove, Vint Falken and Keystone Bouchard) and of course Dusan Writer for their organisation and time, and hope this won’t be the last we hear of the efforts for interface improvement.

New Worlds Notes seems to have started of the ‘aftermath’ with a poll on the features as presented in the designs over here, and all full presentations can be seen here. Title image by SLNN who did the live coverage of the event (showing Dusan, Beyers Sellers of Metanomics, Rheta, Jacek and Roy from left to right).

Posted on: August 13, 2008 | Share on: