Voyage: A road to nowhere

Voyage is a novel feed reader that displays content in a 3D-appearing space, and despite my well-documented reservations about 3D interfaces, I tried to give Voyage a go.  I have to assume that Voyage is not actually a production-level RSS service, but rather a demonstration system, because it is lacking some fundamental features of RSS readers including:

• Personalisation: You can’t create your own account on Voyage, which would mean you had to re-add your feeds every time you visited the site.
• RSS search: Voyage forces you to know the RSS URL of the feed you want to access–not the name of the site or the site URL, but the RSS URL.  This is a big ask of the average user
• Reading: To actually read any interesting RSS feeds you leave Voyage and go to the original site, even in cases where the feed is full-text (rather than an “atom”).
• Pictures: The site does not display pictures. This is a bit of a problem for picture-oriented blogs like I Can Has Cheezburger

Given these limitations, this display feels more like a discovery service for new blogs (along the lines of the liveplasma music and movie discovery service), but it does not have the back-end database of recommendations.  Either way, there are considerable usability problems with this interface:

• The text is not clear and readable
• The 3D-ness of the interface doesn’t add anything (the only dimension that appears to have any meaning at all is the forward and back one), and does make things harder to find (indeed, included in the 23 things task is the “add a feed and try to find it” puzzle).  Given that 3D interfaces perform deomnstrably (PDF) worse in information organisation tasks, and this interface does not have to be 3D, this is a serious usability concern
• The feeds area looks as though you ought to be able to click n the feeds to go to them.  Instead clicking on them deletes them, which given that you need to know the feed URL of a site to add it, is a high cost error for a simple action
• It simply isn’t clear what many of the interface elements (space, colour, the horizontal line) mean, making the interface difficult to learn
• it is difficult to navigate back “out”once you have selected something, meaning that the navigation is difficult and actions cannot be easily undone

Each of these concerns is in contravention of at least one of this excellent list of usability first principles, meaning that basically Voyage is hard to use.  Not only is it difficult to use, but it doesn’t offer either a decent feed reader or an interesting discovery service, so there is nothing in the user experience that is compelling enough to entice users back.  Maybe in a couple of years this concept will be more fully fleshed out, but in the mean time I am going to stick with Google Reader, which does reading and recommendations very well indeed.

Second life and libraries: let’s sort out the first life first

In the past year or so, there has been a lot of hype about Second Life, both in libraries, and in general. First-life companies have been trying to figure out how to commercialise Second Life (somewhat unsuccessfully, it would appear), and some social problems that have involved Second Life (which is not to say that these problems weren’t there anyway, just that Second Life lowers the barriers to them) have emerged.

Because of the library hype surrounding Second Life, I decided I should give it a go (much like I gave LambdaMOO a go once upon a time), and like all 3D environments, I hated it. I found the graphics clunky and slow, the interface difficult to operate, and I never got off the tutorial island. Mostly I hated it, though, because I couldn’t drive my avatar, and I suspect this is because (like 8% of young people, and a significantly greater number of older people) I have reduced stereoacuity, and the 3D model presented on my screen is very little like anything I see in real life.

So, what should Swinburne Library be doing with Second Life? My answer would be “nothing” for a number of reasons, including:

• As of August 2007 (the latest statistics I found) there were 13,567 active* Second Life Avatars based in Australia, and approximately half of all users operate more than one avatar (meaning we can guess that about 9050 Australians log in regularly). Given a population of 20,434,176 Australians, this means that about 0.000443% of Australians are “active” Second Life users — even assuming that Swinburne, being a technical university, has a disproportionately high number of users, we wouldn’t be serving very many people by setting up in Second Life. Of course, we could increase the number of Second Life users by advertising our services there, but I think we would be better off evaluating and improving the services we know our users engage with outside Second Life than creating new services that rely on a commercial third party product, and which our users may not use anyway.
• Second Life requires a very high-speed internet connection and a good graphics card to be at all usable. This may put it outside the reach of many of our users — there are 17.4 broadband connections per 100 people in Australia. Even assuming that there are multiple people sharing most of these connections, and that Swinburne community members have a higher rate of broadband connections than the general population, for many of our community the only way to access to Second Life would be on campus where the video cards are not up to specification.
• If the library’s business is information, then 3D environments are not the place for us; studies have shown that users of 3D information environments perform worse in finding and management tasks than users of 2D environments.

Before I get howled down as a complete luddite, I do believe there is scope for Second Life to be used in educational environments; design schools (like the one at Swinburne) could make (and are making) excellent use of the 3D properties in teaching interior design (and I have heard of at least one example of a student fashion show in Second Life). Also, like LambdaMoo, there is scope for sociological study in Second Life, which may be interesting to Swinburne’s Institute for Social Research. Until there is evidence that research like this is happening at Swinburne, though (and that the researchers want our help in Second Life), or until large numbers of our student population “lives” there, there is little scope for the library to do anything useful there — interesting, maybe but useful definitely not. Given that we have loads of scope to do interesting and useful things in our first lives, for now, I’m going to stick with that.

*Active according to some Linden Labs (the people responsible for Second Life) definition.