Recently I was asked to prepare a written estimate to upgrade the usability of a software product. I had spoken to several of the company principals, who assured me that usability was the central problem they must overcome to be competitive and secure key customers.

So I spent half a day looking at their software, and wrote up my estimate.

Being a user experience designer, I naturally gravitated to such activities as talking to users and integrating their evaluations of the product before, during, and after the rebuild. The tasks included heuristic evaluation, initial usability testing, revised flow models, key flow prototypes, visual design, usability testing of builds, final usability and acceptance testing, and normalized scoring of the finished package to provide a baseline for future projects.

The response I got was classic:  “How much would that cost without the usability testing?”

This goes back to one of my earlier rants, the conflict of features and usability. Features always win, because you can see them. Usability is assumed, like breathing, and is just as hard to explain. But if anyone still wonders how Apple, for example, managed to secure such customer loyalty in the early years, it comes down to that single idea:  they thought about their users and created tools that were easily understood and easily used.

Investing in good usability makes sense only when the time horizon is far beyond the next quarterly report or the next board meeting. Usability is not a quick hit that will produce instant gains. Usability is part of corporate good will, the customer loyalty, and these are not things that an ad campaign can bring in six months. Usability thinking will be in the DNA of the next wave of companies that reach the heights of Amazon, Ebay, Google, Yahoo, and Netflix. Those companies made a science of customer relationships and did not let up when they were successful. Customer experience growing from positive user experience is one solid reason those companies are at the top today. Please see ibmdesign’s post on the ROI of usability.

And yes usability work does cost, and it does take time. But if you don’t have time now to do it right, when will you have time to do it over?

Start with a pet peeve… you see an interesting job posting at XYZ Inc. and wish to explore it. You find yourself once again entering the same personal data into a format that some middle manager thought was so precious. How many times have you found yourself doing that? Can’t tell you how often I’ve bailed because it was too darn much like crawling over broken glass. Who the heck is XYZ, anyway?

What this amounts to is joining endless social networks that want basically the same info on you. You are required to create yet another data mirror by hand.

It is analagous to a merchant asking, “Do you have our rewards card?” Great. Yet another piece of plastic for my wallet that accomplishes an identical function to the ones I already own. Only diff is – it’s for someone else.

The Semantic Web is about data, and we won’t have the semantic web as long as applications are data hoarders. But there are a number of popular SNs that do have most of the data you would like to include in your job app, so why can’t they be available as sources?

A single social graph is a bit much to swallow all at once, but it would be really helpful if at least the major social nets were recognized as templates by all the companies that would just love to have you in their database. Then you pick one on the way in (you are professional and pick LinkedIn or Dice over MySpace for example), hand over your password, and most of your data shows up in XYZ’s template. You modify the info as necessary, you are done. Every so often, or on some trigger, your data could be updated the same way.

The APIs do exist. HR departments, wake up. It ain’t that hard.

Oh… plastic rewards cards. Merchants, forget your precious logo on plastic and let your customers give you a credit card number. Whenever the card is presented the rewards account provides its data without bother. No questions asked.

The conjunction of the semantic web and social networks may include the (artificially) intelligent growth of a member’s network along lines dictated by interpretation of their profile and in-network behavior, by profiles of those already in their network, and by network behavior and profiles of those not already in their network.

This action posits two distinct growth edges for a given player’s network. One is the growth edge of a particular player, the intention as it were, of that player’s network and profile. The other is the proximity or suitability of a player to the growth edge of all players in the network.

This effect is already shown to a degree on LinkedIn for example, where members recently joined from past employers are presented as possible linkages. Also in services like Amazon (people who bought this item also bought…). Music services approximate this behavior as well. With Pandora, the Music Genome dictates suggestions based on genome attributes preferred by the user.

This fits the Semantic Web concept, wherein the Web itself is understanding and satisfying unstated requests of members with regard to Web content and connections. In this model the semantic web is informing the creation of collaborative groups, fueled by enabling technologies that now exist.

Chapter 2 of:

Abuse, Sex and Addiction in Online Communities
Copyright Lee Baldwin 2009
@ArtOfSilence
Sleep

“It is 11 pm in Hawaii. Asleep in bed, my eyes snap open. Where are my friends? What are they doing? What has been posted in the forums? Who is on now?

“As these thoughts pass through my head, I am not thinking about people I know in real life, I am thinking of people I know only as avatars in an online chat environment known as IMVU (an avatar-based social network and virtual world).

“It is seven hours before I need to get up, but my friend in Australia will be on now. I so love spending time with her. I drag myself to my computer, switch it on. I can nap later. If I’m tired in the morning, I’ll get someone to fill my shift at work. But my day has begun.

“Lately I cannot sleep more than 4 or 5 hours. I wake up in a state of blissful anxiety, ready to see what is happening in the online world I occupy whenever I can make time. How much time? Usually I can manage six hours a day, but I have done twice that in a day more times than I can remember. I do mean every day, seven days a week. My online life has become my only life.

“I have IMVU friends in a dozen time zones around the world. I have a time zone map I look at when I come on, to know what time it is in various places, the UK, Europe, Philippines, Indonesia, Australia. The U.S. is easy because I live in Hawaii, 3 hours to the West Coast (2 in the winter), 3 to Arizona, 6 to New York, Florida, South Carolina…

“There she is, I see her on and send an invite, the day begins. It is 11:20 pm for me, in IMVU it is no time and anytime… “

~ StephanieStarlite, May 2, 2009

This is Normal?

Why begin a chapter extolling normalcy with an extreme example? First, this statement from a chat player is in fact fairly typical. Throughout the worlds of online avatar chat, it is common for players to mention that they have not slept, that they will catch a nap later, that they have taken a personal day or called in sick at work. Being heavily distracted by one’s online existence is the new normal at least.

A Brief History of Avatar Chat

The most basic element of online avatar chat is instant messaging or IM. IM has been around for two decades, and is these days exemplified by MSN, Yahoo, and similar popular chat clients. The client (messaging software) that runs on your PC can be aware of which of your contacts (buddies, friends, etc.) are currently signed on, and can display whatever typed messages are sent to you, literally within seconds of when your correspondent keys them in and clicks the SEND button.

IM is virtually immediate. Unlike email, you don’t have to wait and reload your mail client to see new messages. You can carry on a full conversation in real time, no matter where you or your chat partner are located.

In the beginning, or almost so, was The Sims, which began as a stand-alone computer game, but grew into an online multi-player version and a way of life for some. First shipped in early 2000, The Sims and its various titles have become a cultural phenomenon, the best selling PC game of all time. Largely the work of one designer, Will Wright, the first version, SimCity, let players act as a combination of mayor, city planner, and creator of the universe. An early title was SimAnt, where players controlled ants in an ant colony, performing the social and constructive activities ants engage in. SimAnt provided one of the first controllable avatars.

Later with SimTown, players could create and manage specific Sims, or avatars, that explore the town. This was a departure, as these Sims had customizable personalities (clothes, favorite foods and personal mottoes). The individual placement of buildings, roads, and gardens, plus random disasters and other problems, was a generative idea leading to future avatar worlds.

In The Sims you build a home, add landscaping with swimming pools and gardens, then live there, having conversations, creating characters, families and careers, developing friends and relationships.

The game spawned online discussion forums where players shared what they were doing with their various Sims versions. This online fan community spawned the idea of taking The Sims game environment online, where your Sim or avatar could interact with other Sims controlled by other real people over the Internet, literally around the world.

This development made of The Sims a massively multi-player online role play game (MMORPG), still with Wright’s goals of rewarding player creativity and emphasizing the social community. The Sims Online came out in 2002, allowing people anywhere to play a game where a real person motivates and makes decisions for every Sim. Sims meet, chat, and explore in multiple environments designed to some extent by the players themselves, including houses, night clubs, jungles, beaches, airplanes, and so on, all while chatting with other real players through their Sims avatar.

So the fusion of IM and avatars in visual environments through The Sims and other games, mostly first-person shooter (FPS) games, evolved into various chat themes. There is a complex taxonomy of computer games, including online games. Most people are aware of the FPS games, where the player controls an avatar that basically tries to blow up everything in sight. The 3D avatar chat worlds are sometimes termed Text Role Play (TRP), or online text-based role playing games. Both FPS and TRP are MMPORGs, but the text role play has little to do with keeping score and is much more social, where conversation and social interplay are the core values and activities. Chat sites seem to fit the general description of autonomous role play wish fulfillment fantasy.

Where is Virtual Reality, Really?

MMPORPGs (sometimes abbreviated as MMO) are not necessarily games per se and are not exclusive to personal computers. The PlayStation Portable, PlayStation 3, Xbox 360, Nintendo DS, Wii and others can access the Internet and may therefore run MMO games. The Apple iPhone plus mobiles and smartphones running Windows Mobile and Google’s Android have MMO games available and in development. So in this sense, virtual reality is becoming pocket-sized and more ubiquitous, perhaps heading toward the wireless, molecular-level ‘Nanex’ posited in the 2009 film, Gamer.

Online Avatar Chat Sites and Environments

Chat environment, chat site or service, chat URL, host company and so on are interchangeable labels for what has historically been called a chat room. There is a long list of chat sites available on such services as chatterhead.net. Some of the foremost in quality and popularity are Second Life, Red Light Chat, IMVU, Gaia Online, Habbo Hotel, Maple Story, and so on. Online avatar chat is an immersion rather than a game, not played so much as experienced, and popular due to its autonomous role play nature. In avatar chat, people become accustomed to projecting the needs of their personalities into a new social structure. Those needs can be anything imaginable, from ordinary fun-loving chat about RL topics (politics, entertainment, sports, etc.) to fulfilling every human desire, whatever that may come to mean.

IMVU as an Example

IMVU, Second Life, etc. somewhat resemble The Sims Online mixed with social networking aspects such as MySpace, FaceBook, LinkedIn, and so on. On IMVU for example there are four basic actions: use the IM client to exchange typed messages in real time, conversing with other players; interact on a simulated physical level, by moving your avatar to one of many locations in the scene; participate in the social network by inviting others to be your friend, exchanging private messages and gifts in the form of clothing, homes, furniture and so on; contributing to group forum discussions.

The Kinds of Problems Chat Can Solve

Avatar chat does facilitate social situations for several classes of players. Someone who is crippled or disabled can get by perfectly well in an online environment. Players often confide that they are shy in normal social encounters, and these people can overcome that shyness in avatar chat as no one can see their hesitations or failings. People who are unhappy with their physical appearance can interact on the same level as anyone else within the game, and the same can be said of a long list of social difficulties from acne to deafness and body odor.

In Second Life (SL) there is a scene called “Wheelies”, a focus for disability issues, coined for people in wheel chairs. Some create SL avatars completely unlike their RL selves, while others’ avatars represent the truth. This opens possibilities for those who struggle with mobility and dexterity. I’ve heard of one avatar ‘team’ comprising several disabled patients and one caregiver, who handles inworld navigation and speaking (typing).

While IM activity is often based on existing workgroups, friends and acquaintances, avatar chat is quite inclusive, and a player can, through the persona of the avatar, develop a group of friends or pseudo friends who don’t care who is behind the avatar so long as the persona is a match and the conversation and ongoing relationships are interesting. This can become quite riveting for players who feel isolated or disaffected in RL. Their online life and friendships take on much more importance, pushing online play beyond a mere compulsion to an outright need.

Chat rooms generally facilitate meeting like-minded others. A player’s small town or restrictive moral or social context may prevent contact with those interested in roles and behaviors such as bow hunting, race car chassis tuning, homosexuality, or darker role play such as vampirism or lycanism, submission and domination, transgender and so forth. In the online world with millions of participants it is generally easy to place those attributes in a search profile and be matched instantly with others who may share your particular dream, nightmare, or hallucination.

The best virtual worlds provide the ability to create unique avatars and living spaces. To keep virtual visitors coming back, sites must also offer compelling activities, such as games or competitions with other avatars. For the host network, it is all about increasing the allure, and thereby income. What makes avatar chat unique is lack of particular goal or quest; people simply form social fabrics in real time and participate in them.

Ordinary People

Alright, if you are like most you’re ready to skip to the sections on abuse, domination, sex, and addiction. After all, what is life without drama? That will be fine, but those discussions will be more clearly rendered if there is first a good grounding in what passes for ‘normal’ in avatar chat.

On the surface avatar chat is just… chat. However, in environments like Second Life, Red Light Chat, Vivaty, IMVU and the many others, the scene trappings and appearance of the avatars, the dress, hair, makeup and so on are powerful visual cues to the persona the player is wishing to project. Even with the lightest commitment, these environments are immersive wish fulfillment fantasies. If you or I can chat from perfect puppets, we can create perfect lives for ourselves as well, whch underlines the autonomous role play aspect.

But why am I present in a chat environment? Am I interested in meeting and learning about other people, or am I interested in impressing others with my fabulous existence? Many folks desire the former, meeting others, and the Internet’s many motifs including email, forums, IM and avatar chat provide means to interact with others who share your interests, no matter how small your local community or how specialized your focus. There are tens of millions of people online at this moment engaged in chat and many would be interested to discuss your topic.

Where it begins to get sticky for some is simply the ability to elaborate the personality, to create and project an improved persona to other people. That is the center of the compulsion and addiction discussions we will engage later.

Friends

It is not necessarily easy to make friends in online chat, though the mechanics appear simple enough. You talk to others randomly, topics and opinions come up, bonds are made, or not, and everyone moves on. It requires a fair amount of work to identify each new friend. You can set search criteria for random chat partners including age, gender, general interests, location, language spoken and so forth, but that will not guarantee a mesh of personality or of interests. People who respond to your random chat invitation may not be aware that they have been selected randomly by the system, so becoming oriented to one another takes a fair bit of doing. As in parlor games, such as Pin the Tail on the Donkey or Twenty Questions, there is a generous amount of hit-or-miss.

But as you develop friendships and add them to your friends list (for easy location in later sessions) you begin to learn things about the chat environment, its language, cultural patterns and mores, and your persona may adjust to fit with the people you meet and take on as friends.

At some point – horror of horrors – you discover that some avatars are more popular than your avatar. How do they do that? How do they receive so many page visits, gifts, and have so many friends? This too can be an illusion. How well do you know the standards of that so-popular avatar? Have they merely placed every avatar they’ve spoken with on their friends list? Or have they taken the time to evaluate the quality of each relationship, and actually have things in common?

Popularity derives from a number of factors, and one is the avatar name. Naming one’s avi is a science in itself – it is the name appearing in the scene’s chat log that first establishes the essence and mystique of the persona. Most telling is the large number of avatar names that include the word sex, or references to sexual actions or body parts. Names such as bigmeat, hornypussy, sexygirl, sexigurl, sexxigurrl, smexygirll, sexyellen, 269kathie, etc. (Not real avatar names, so far as I know, but constructed from the usual parts and misspellings. Given the popularity of the root words, there eventually may be actual avatars going by such labels.) These names may suggest the mindset of the player. Or not. A rose by any other name…

Avatar naming is another illustration of how chat is accepted as autonomous role play by the participants. The lowest common denominators are physical appearance and sexual power. Since the coin of the realm is primarily words, players select and define their personas via description and naming. You see endless repetition of claims to be the ultimately sexiest person in the entire world. There are numerous claims of “No matter how hard you try you will never be me”, “I’m a bitch but I’m so damn lovable”. Of course there is the ever-popular, “Sorry I’m taken!” If these were in some way unique I would not quote them. All are cheap characterizations that attempt to illustrate their uniqueness, but after the 10^th time you see the same idea expressed in near-identical words, it appears ludicrous and shallow.

Then there is the factor of time, the true coin of online life. Many who seem well connected are that way because they have been on for a year or more, and spend considerable time and cash online to maintain and grow those connections.

Relationships and Romance

As nearly any chat user will attest, the avatars and scenes may be an illusion on the monitor, but the emotions are all too real in person. People laugh and feel joy, experience loss and sorrow, and sometimes, somewhere at home, shed real tears. People find attraction, begin to experience affinity and bonds, and perhaps feelings of infuation and love.

It is relatively simple to declare another avi as somehow special to your own avi, declaring a personal relationship or admiration. It is another matter to declare one’s avi as married to another avi. There is no church, no city hall, no hall of records. But two people can invite friends’ avatars to a social function and call it a wedding, recite vows, and proceed from there as a married couple. Limited to the world of avatars, there is no cohabitation, no children (unless another player agrees to have their avatar act as adopted by the couple), no joint ownership of property, or any of the customary benefits or burdens of a joint life. At this juncture the autonomous role play becomes more structured, heading for more formal role play such as in a family or other interest group.

Indeed, being married as an avatar provides little actual restriction, there is plenty of freedom to roam around as though single, subject only to being caught out by a mutual friend. Do people create multiple avatar accounts do this purpose? Yes they do. I was aware of some with as many as five separate accounts.

Some of the other ways players can heighten their online relationships include using other IM clients, webcam (cam), phone, email (outside of the chatroom messaging), and f2f (face to face).

Some friends and couples use a secondary IM client simultaneously with their chatroom client so they can stay in sync. This separate channel fills the role of significant glances, kicks under the table, hand squeezes and so on, and is simply a private IM between the two. With this they can ‘mind read’ one another and so act more as a couple in the public chat.

Cam or Webcam is a direct form of visiting that can serve as a secondary channel while the avatars chat in public, or as a primary channel through which the players speak and view one another directly. Cam carries voice and video over IP, and can be taken over and the images viewed by hackers unless properly secured.

Phone or mobile texting is another supplementary channel that can be the primary channel when avatar chat is not possible, such as when the players are at work or with RL partners and families.

Face to face (f2f) meetings are of course the most fundamental. The friends have agreed to meet in RL and after this the avatar chat becomes secondary. If the meeting goes well and there is a relationship, the avatar chat may be simply the preferred way to stay in touch when distance intervenes. If the meeting does not go well then the avatar relationship may well cease to exist.

There are numerous stories of players meeting in RL that did not go well. I heard one story of a man who traveled hundreds of miles to meet his paramour, only to find her caring for an ex-husband who had just suffered a paralyzing stroke. The demands placed on the woman were so extreme that she ended the relationship on the spot. I heard of a couple who knew each other by avatar chat and phone. When one of them died, the other was contacted by the decedent’s family, and invited to the funeral several states away.

In many chat systems each avatar can add images to a personal photo gallery. Most commonly these are snaps of the avatar in various clothing or surroundings. Significantly, although less frequent, are those players who post actual photographs in their profiles. These players may be seeing the online experience more as a step toward RL hookups. The majority of players I chatted with did not mix the two. Occasionally there would be an exchange of email addresses or even phone numbers; providing location information is much more rare and quite risky… you don’t really know who you are talking to.

Needless to say there are many opportunities for predators to lure young or unsuspecting players to meetings that are not for the best. All chatrooms have some stated minimum age policies, although most are weakly enforced. And, most teens know very well how to get around such restrictions, how to lift mom’s credit card and so forth, and in general pose as adults in the online world.

Through one of my avatars I found myself chatting with several people who, while quite bright, did not seem the ages their profiles stated (22 and 23). After several chats, I got each of them to admit their real ages as from 13-15. (This may or may not have been the truth.) I told them to be careful and they seemed to know the risks and were completely self-confident in the avatar world. They were geographically separated over several southern states and had not known one another prior to playing on IMVU. They were, however, connected through other IM clients and phone and had plans to meet given an opportunity.

In usual circumstances, players can chat one-on-one, join public rooms and encounter whoever might be present at any time of the day or night, create public rooms devoted to some members-only interest group, show off their clothes, animations, music, furniture, and poses, and in general act like artificial people operated by real ones off stage, a kind of flat screen puppet show.

In the online world, the usual activity is a dress-up role play fantasy in which the players may resemble what they say about themselves in terms of gender, age, location, RL relationships, employment and social status, and a good deal more.

Or they may not. And that is normal.

These stories are all over the Internet, but this one in particular about a judge who called in sick after a night of intense gaming is an interesting glimpse.

Glossary this chapter

MMORPG: massively multi-player online role play game

MMO: abbreviation for MMORPG

FPS: First-person shooter game

TRP: Text role play (one categorization of avatar chat)

Partial list of avatar chat sites requiring no client download.

Chapter 1 of:

Abuse, Sex and Addiction in Online Communities
Copyright Lee Baldwin 2009
@ArtOfSilence

The avatar names used in all quoted chats are fictitious, and are not intended to represent any real person or actual avatars in any way. Contents of all conversations have been edited to remove references to anyone’s actual life situation.

Online avatar chat generally is a computer-based role-play fantasy experience augmented by various scenic props such as appearance, clothing, objects, and property. The goals include the usual real life social goals: enjoyment, interest, power, love, and wealth. Health and progeny are not usual issues for an avatar.

In classic role play, participants assume the roles of fictional, historical, or other predefined characters according to a script or text; the chat becomes an improvised play. Online avatar chat is autonomous role play because each character is created by the participant on the fly. Do people falsify their age, gender, location, marital status, capabilities, or interests when creating their avatar? Yes they sometimes do. Avatar chat provides participants free rein over many factors to suit the kind of ego fulfillment they seek in the online space. Each avatar’s persona evolves in real time, in context with the other players’ avatars and the shared history. There is thus an element of guesswork in simply coming to know the other players in the chat.

The avatar is a player’s customizable projection on the interactive environment by which they are known, signified, and identified. Through your avatar you may be transfigured, trans-substantiated, trans-gendered, and variously transformed into something you might actually rather be in society.

This makes of the online chat experience a wish fulfillment fantasy, the satisfaction of human desires, needs, or impulses as through a dream, story, or other exercise of the imagination. Reinforced by attractive and nimble 3D avatars, the players can indulge their wish for clothing, homes, possessions, lovers, and adventures. This wish fulfillment takes place in a shared imagination, where the other players support and attest to the reality of the illusion.

Online avatar chat is a new form of experience in which physical laws scarcely exist. Fundamentally, chat is two or more people sending instant messages (IM) via computer keyboard and display, but because of the visual trappings, a great deal of the social context is communicated nonverbally by sounds, gestures, placement, poses, animated actions, body language, and manipulation of objects in the scene.

Free-form unstructured fantasy adventure makes each player literally the star of every scene, and the medium itself a new form of human communication. But what exactly is avatar chat, what system does it belong to? Is it a game, a virtual world, or an interactive novel? Is it role play, a simulation, literature or theater? Is it a social network or a producer-consumer economic system?

Avatar chat is fundamentally different from a game. Games use some form of scoring, such as tokens, laps completed, monsters or opponents slain. Chat is unstructured joint creation of a social fabric, in which each player adds to the weave through the actions and ideas expressed through their avatar. However, the underlying psychology is that of any game, mystery, scavenger hunt, or puzzle: how do I get rewarded, how does my ego get its lunch?

The key values of personality are the basis of friendship and interplay as in real life… the currencies of online chat are literacy, wit, humor, and intelligence. These are much more difficult to disguise or make over than the visible accoutrement one can buy with a credit card. The core elements of the personality remain, and central among them is one’s dexterity with a keyboard and verbal expression. The facts one knows, the idiom, references and verbal skills one commands are the salient aspects of the persona, which cannot be masked or adorned by simple purchase of alluring clothing or impressive chat environments. In their new persona, a player can purchase a monthly subscription to their own ego.

It is clear that many online players depend extensively on secondary cues for social status. This is no surprise as we learn those values in real world socialization. But communication of ideas in an online world is strictly verbal. None of the body language, gesture, vocal inflection, guttural and other expressive sounds are available in text chat. Your avatar is your fancy transformer car, it is the clothing you wear into the online encounter. But it is only the clothing. Some chat environments provide a limited number of avatar animations triggered by verbal cues. For example, ‘haha’ typed in as text might produce a laughing posture and animation, but the science today is far from matching avatar action to the context of the written message.

The overriding currency in avatar chat is the amount of time spent in the environment. A memorable impression of your avatar, of you, forms in the chat society only over repeated encounters. It takes time for others to value and integrate your actions as part of the shared experience.

As in any society, players discuss certain topics only in the presence of particular others. So there are strata of relationships that range from the ordinary bantering, joke-telling and story-telling, through the attachments formed by close friends, romantic partnerships, online marriages, and in some cases meetings in real life through phone calls, email, and face to face. Online romance and marriage can become very tricky, as many view this form of escape as cheating on real life partners. Although there is a sense of time compression in the chat environment, it takes considerable (real) time and emotional energy to form and maintain personal bonds.

The same is true of avatar sex, or cybersex. Many chat environments do make available furniture, poses, vocal sounds and animations that are sexually explicit, including naked avatars, sometimes with functioning body parts, along with other props for sexual encounters. However, since the core expression is text response, avatar sex is very tricky, requiring a great deal of verbal dexterity to communicate on a deep feeling level.

Who is spending time in avatar chat? A check of chatterhead.net for example in late 2009 turned up some 150 different chat environments. Second Life and IMVU claim a couple of million registered users, but the ‘Three Card Monte’ these companies play with their numbers is so intense no one knows what they actually mean. IMVU shows its logged in count in quasi real time and that ran 50,000 – 90,000 throughout the day in Summer 2009. If there were 25,000 current active users on each of 150 chat environments that would amount to as many as 4 million players on worldwide at a given time. [need better info]

There are practical uses of avatar chat in the real world. Anyone separated from friends or family can log in to any of dozens of sites and IM with someone on the other side of the globe. Chat is a counterpart of Skype in that sense. It is quite easy to add a webcam either separately or through the chat site in some cases, providing vision, sound, and text for no more than your usual Internet connection charges. Chat is a chance for the young to explore new friendships and relationships, learn about the music and the hip culture in other cities, states, or countries.

Mike Fred is a Behavior Intervention Specialist who uses World of Warcraft in a therapeutic context with challenged youngsters. He points out that WoW has proven beneficial to students socially, academically, and therapeutically. With increasing involvement in playing, they have made social connections with other players online. Relationships formed by members of this group are rare, so this is significant.

One of Fred’s students with a learning disability has shown reading improvements because WoW is text-based, highlighting that children will work to read material if it has meaning for them. For this student, finding out where to gather certain game objects was a reason to work harder at school.

Withdrawn, disconnected kids were able to form relationship with an in-game therapist, and in that setting were able to discuss things that had happened during the day, which eventually transferred to f2f discussions.

To head on over to the dark side, consider borderline personality disorder. Marsha Linehan, developer of Dialectical Behavior Therapy, or DBT, at the University of Washington, states that many addictions, and in particular BPD, are rooted in biological disorder combined with environmental disorder. Linehan points out that BPD individuals describe chaotic relationships and ‘confused identities’. Author, therapist and spiritual mentor Raphael Cushnir on the other hand points out that the simple inability or lack of training in facing emotions directly is the key to addictive behavior. He shows how one can resist the contractive, automatic “mental switch off” when difficult emotions arise, which may be helpful in exposing the heart of an addiction or compulsion.

What more perfect storm could there be for someone experiencing confusion in personal identity, seeking emotional escape, and fearful of the negative realities of their personality, than the ability to create an immortal avatar with perfect attributes and project that into a virtual world and interact with other players’ avatars as normal or even super normal? Players characterize themselves on their profile pages, and we see a lot of over-compensation, as in, “The sexiest person alive”, “The most powerful”, “The most beautiful”, etc. It is wish-fulfillment fantasy in a shared imagination.

There are many attractive nuisances in the world and avatar chat can become the addiction of choice for certain personalities in some circumstances. At the same time, chat can be a healthy outlet for shared play and creativity.

Avatar chat is a role-play fantasy experience that has elements of many other genres, yet is unique in the way it impacts the player’s cultural identity. It is a new milepost in the evolution of literature and drama, and appears to be a new branch or style of communication. And, online autonomous role play is a form of literature that meets full circle with the story tellings and enactments around camp fires of old.

The development of hypertext for the World Wide Web was a revolution that has moved printed material practically off the board. So if there is a new literature based on anything electronic, it will resemble the act of paging through hard copy very little if at all. Linearity has become outmoded in favor of random access. Lengthy paragraphs and chapters have vanished in favor of hyperlinks and soundbytes. So there is an abrupt disjoin between almost any kind of printed material and most kinds of verbal electronic communication.

This short chat illustrates the way verbiage is used and understood in some areas of avatar chat. Notice the shortcuts and re-spellings, phonetic phrasing, and the resulting impact on grammar.

Tarnish110111: hey

James1011101: heyz

Tarnish110111: hrya

James1011101: how r u

Girl11001: hey

Tarnish110111: good nu

Guy10011: heyy

Girl11001: hi

Guy10011: i like you legs

James1011101: good thnks

Girl11001: thanks

Vanessa100101: hey

James1011101: hey vanessa

Erin10001: hi james

Vanessa100101: hey

James1011101: hey erinnn

Girl11001: how are you

Erin10001: wit u up to

Grit060: okay i named the pig charlie

Guy10011: im good

Guy10011: you?

Girl11001: me too..

James1011101: nithing u

Erin10001: nuthin

Guy10011: wanna go back to your room

Vanessa100101: how are you doin?

Girl11001: my room?

Erin10001: how old are you

James1011101: good how r u doin

Girl11001: oh someone wanna talk to you

Guy10011: yeah and get dirty?

James1011101: im 22 u

Erin10001: 18

James1011101: cool

Vanessa100101: i just turned 20 in march:)

James1011101: nice

Girl11001: well.. im just joined here

Erin10001: ur cute

Vanessa100101: 1 more year and i can drink!!

James1011101: thnks u2

Vanessa100101: legally that is hehe

James1011101: hahaha

Erin10001: come in the hot tub

………………….

Presenting a minimal common denominator as an example of avatar chat may seem preposterous when speaking in terms of a new literature. But the future always looks like a catastrophe to the past and there are useful observations to be made here.

This chat was occupied by individuals aged 18 – 22, of college age in other words, although we can only guess at their formal education. First we must consider the context. These people grew up with Xbox, Playstation, handheld game consoles, the World Wide Web, text-capable phones and PDAs, email, YouTube, MTV, television commercials, and Hollywood movies. They did not necessarily spend much time with books or in expressing themselves through handwriting. On the Internet their common motifs run to shorthand and typographical errors, sometimes intentional, plus abbreviations and re-spellings (‘tung’ is the prevalent re-spelling of ‘tongue’). The only thing that matters is getting the meaning across. In viewing hours of online chat one seldom sees anyone ask for clarification, as in ‘Huh?’ or ‘What do you mean?’ They simply make a guess and forge onward. That is, if they are in the same general age group.

Now add the fact that this generation and those following are much more visually sophisticated than earlier ones. They are able to construe meaning from images that appear for the shortest possible time – a single frame of film or video – and view that kind of rapid-fire content for long periods, such as the first 23 minutes of the 2009 film, Gamer. They are visual not verbal. Television commercials and films of the 1980s had a cutting pace as quick as one new shot every six seconds. Today, sub-second cuts are commonplace and people, especially the young, are drawing correct meaning from that visual flood.

So avatar chat, with its emphasis on the 2D or 3D scene, furniture, rooms, clothing and hairstyles not to mention faces, plus autonomous and random animations, is going to be more visual than verbal for many players.

How do we construe avatar chat? It is first of all not monolithic. There is the apparent opportunity for economic, educational, and therapeutic channels that are positive, as well as the risk of habit-forming and addictive channels that are problematic. The place of avatar chat and its MMO/MMORPG siblings will be debated until the 21^st Century is a dot on history’s spectrum. But there is no one who will seriously dispute that it is here. The question is entirely, What will we make of it?

I would guess about zero.

Which brings me to the point of user experience design for the real world… the walking around, space-contention and collision real world.

Malls, city street corners, tree-lined boulevards. City planners put in vegetation, which is attractive, decorative, and oxygen-producing, but overlook the limited line of vision this sometimes creates.

Here are a few things that go wrong, with implied suggestions:

Malls:-

1. Bushes are right at the end of a parking row or at a stop sign. Drivers of smaller cars cannot see over those. Many of those bushes are taller than some children, or a person on a tricycle, skateboard, or small bike. These drivers must inch out (driving by Braille) until they can see.

2. Decorative trees lining sidewalks often have foliage lower than the visual plane of an adult. Some pedestrians cannot see down the street and must step over the curb or into the street to clear this. Jaywalking is illegal yes but this adds to the risk for everyone.

3. Combine 1 and 2 above.

4. Big trucks or dumpsters parked at street corners. Businesses with corner locations have to be aware of this.  Some drivers forced to stop will lower their car windows and their music and listen… next to large objects such as trucks and dumpsters this trick will not provide much warning.

5. Visual challenges. Planners and traffic/pedestrian designers sometimes put too many things to look at. The situation changes every second and people arriving at a location have to scan repeatedly until they pass through. With more than three directions to check for, or odd signage, directions, configurations, etc. this becomes unrecognizable and dangerous.

Having worked extensively in the UI/UX design arena since 1995, and pursued user inquiries for tech doc and marketing programs before that, I can’t say I’ve witnessed UX considerations win out over feature choices for the next breathless release. Ever.

Is it because the stakeholders never spend a second in the product support department, or listen to the teeth-gnashing of the tech writers and marketing copy writers as they return from a dev meeting trying to explain something in mere words that was built around an esoteric mental model? Or because the feature’s reason to be is based not on user research but on ‘coding coolness’.

I asked one developer to tell me who was supposed to understand a feature they were building. Answer: “Me and Tim.” Attempts to introduce a more accessible mental model failed because there was ‘not enough time’. Or maybe there weren’t enough Tims.

Is it because the same copy writers fail in their ability to explain the qualities of the user experience, or what the UX actually is to begin with? That is admittedly a tough problem. How does one explain breathing, anyway?

It is hard to explain user experience as a feature.

It’s because we all overlook the difference between quick judgements (e.g., usability evaluations) and long-term use (e.g., a beta trial). Malcolm Gladwell in his book Blink spent a good 45 pages with the issue of market research, and came up with the notion that we often ask questions that are exactly wrong for the important issues. The key comment the UX professional hears is there is not enough time. Not enough time for what? To do the job right?

UX designers chime in – what is your take? Same? Better? Worse?

Whenever anyone asks about my approach to user experience design, I always frame the answer by asking this first:

Who is it for?
What do they need to be successful?
How do they know when they are done?

From those three questions the UX designer can elaborate all of the steps required to perform user research, wireframes, flows, interface design, and usability evaluation.

UI and UX designers and user researchers live their lives on lists. Many lists, long ones. This is the shortest list I have seen that can actually guide the designer each step along the way (with reference to the more detailed lists of course).

Who is it for:=

This covers user research and persona development. Embedded in the answers is the profile of behaviors and preferences users of your particular application will exhibit.

What do they need to be successful:=

This starts with a list of tools and extends to the motifs, wireframes, and flows.

How do they know when they are done:=

This also appears in the flows, but leads to user evaluation of the builds or finished app.

Today I am thinking about the shared goal OC (online community) and about what would be in it. I am interested in what can be done in the arena of stock trading or betting (possibly the same thing).

The member’s goal would be to become a better trader or investor and to become a strategist rather than react to tips.

There is the element of timeliness – members might have to make decisions quickly – and are interested in the aggregate opinion of all the members. I see it as a set of channels that are different Web 2.0 motifs such as

• chats (one to one or group IM)
• profiles (controls detail of member’s portfolio they wish shared)
• tag cloud
• PM (private messages – internal email)
• shout-out (public messages to all members)
• news
• stock ticker

I left out blogs. Why? Because I see the membership looking not for a singular POV or tips but for the sentiments of the group. Further they are interested in quick decisions.

This kind of beast would weight what members have actually bought/sold or plan to trade near-term.

It is very important to integrate news, which would be done in the form of feeds. One key feature would be to search across all channels (via a filter set to select which channels to include in the search). Those would be returned in chrono order (selectable as forward or reverse listed) from which the member could scan and build up a narrative.

Provide access to the cross-promotion services such as Tweet, Digg, Delicious, FB trading, etc.

Groups within the OC would emphasize particular trading styles, e.g., buy/hold, value investing, day trading, etc.

What would the sponsor get out of it? If an online trading site put this together, they could realize more trade activity, better market placement, better marketplace buzz – make their site a more attractive place to be, gain the ‘unfair advantage’, visibility/customer awareness. A cluster of more interested and more active traders would create a lot of buzz and traffic, especially when they became noticeably more successful as a group.

I am trying to deepen my understanding of “social networking” by creating a classification system based on the user goal. As a test of the system, I have looked at many of the http://mashable.com/2007/10/23/social-networking-god/ examples to see if they would land neatly in the scheme.

Proper taxonomies are parent-child or type-subtype, where each subtype has the same properties or behaviors as the parent plus one or more additional properties.

I grant that this will not be an orthogonal taxonomy – there will be shared properties of course among siblings – I am attempting to classify a top level according to primary user goal – what sites would appeal to a player if they have a particular objective in mind?

LinkedIn for example would classify as Personal/Professional Marketing, but as one joins LinkedIn groups and makes contacts it can appear more like Shared Project or P2P.

BTW, to classify as an OC, I posit that players must have access to the social graph. An online job or resume bank therefore would not be a community, as a job seeker cannot befriend, and access the profiles of, other job seekers. Yahoo Groups and Google Groups likewise do not fit as a VC or an OC because the members are not directly knowable to one another within the group structure.

So here are the top-level categories with some of the http://mashable.com/2007/10/23/social-networking-god/ sites dropped in. In 90 minutes of reading the GOD list I found none that did not fit. The GOD list categories would be subsumed beneath these.

P2P. Objective: Knowing other individuals.
FaceBook, most avatar chat, Jambo, Amiglia, CafeMom, Cingo, Famster, Kincafe…

Personal/Professional Marketing. Objective: Persuading others to back your social agenda, furthering your career.
MySpace, LinkedIn, ImageKind, Doostang, mediabistro, Ryze, XING, Twitter…

Entertainment. Objective: play and win online games, listen to music, watch video…
World of Warcraft, Pandora, YouTube…

Shared Project or Support. Objective: cooperatively creating and learning approaches to RL activities such as work-related strategies, stock trading, horse betting; providing mutual support for RL problems a la an encounter or therapy group.
Connectbeam, MothersClick, Parentography…