VWR-8080

A lot of people have been confused by VWR-8080 (from the comments I've read, they see a change but don't understand why), so I took a bit of time this evening to try to better explain the reasoning: (As LL still refuses to communicate on SL-UX, let 'em explain it on the JIRA.)

A newbie won't stay if they accidentally become naked and don't know why. Neither will they stay if they go out and buy one of those "awesome cheap avatars" from places like Grendel's only to find they can't figure out how it works (some Mentors have this problem, even). Learning that there are Prim Avatars and Fleshy Avatars--and the differences between the two--is a largely trial and error affair. If you've ever helped a noob hair shop, you should be aware of how noobs are confused by the difference between prim hair and the "bald hair" that accompanies it. (You need to wear this hair, but not this hair because it hides your hair. You can right click this hair but not that hair. Hair is hair, right?) Trying to explain why clicking your nametag works one way while clicking your avatar works another also elicits similar confusion (they're both you, right?).

Unless you're doing content creation or editing, the UI really doesn't give you an indication of whether you're wearing prim bits or avatar bits. This is especially difficult for newbies as they haven't had a chance to learn and memorize the same subtleties we all have. We've all been tainted by our experience such that we can look at an avatar and instantly understand what parts of it are prims, what are clothes, etc. True newbies must just see shoes regardless of how they were made; knowledge otherwise can't be apriori. (Although you could bypass this with a tutorial, but why would you want to introduce yourself to others by telling them how confusing your virtual world is?)

Prim-based avatars are really the best way to illustrate this problem, but as I said above it's also an attachment issue. I strongly feel that when you take a problem and make it inherent from the beginning--i.e. changing to prim-based hair and full-prim new avatars--the need to fix it should become even more important. Fixing the inventory means fixing the asset server, and that's just not going to happen in a million years. The UI is fair game for improvement, though.

So, you tell the user an avatar is an avatar, don't worry about what's you and what's not unless you really need to know; just go along your merry way. Right click wherever on your av you want, it's always going to give you your basic avatar options. Hence, the JIRA issue and following patch.

Now, whether or not a fix adequately addresses the problem or creates new ones is a different animal entirely. Clearly, a lot of people had legitimate issues with the final pie menu that arose, so further changes were required. On that front, I take full responsibility for the idea; I won't take any for the ugly edits in 1.23, because that's not my doing. LL rushed out their own version without telling us ("us" being the participants of SL-UX who were currently talking about the issue). They wouldn't even say if they'd apply a patch that addressed people's concerns, then they went ahead and committed something anyway without participating in our discussion. So, I think that says a lot about LL, especially since they later backtracked yet again (what you get when you don't listen to your users).

The pie menu is rather important to me. I've submitted a bunch of pie menu patches, and I've applied the version LL ignored to Imprudence for 1.1. So far there's been nothing but "this is a lot better" comments. Erica Linden (who is awesome in every way) also used it as an opportunity to fix another related major pie menu bug: people accidentally detaching stuff. This is akin to accidentally muting someone (which I fixed on the pie, and someone else far more ingenious than myself fixed fundamentally) in that even experienced users struggle with this. It's far harder to misclick and detach things, now.

Solutions clearly differ.