Rheta Shan was the winner of User Interface design contest and helped to re-imagine how the tools and menus of the Second Life client could be tailored to what a resident DOES rather than what the world offers. Rheta’s full entry was posted on her blog along with documentation and we put together a little Flash demo to give a sense of the entry. But perhaps the contest achieved a wider purpose than selecting a winner. Jacek Antonelli’s second place design, for example, brought a detailed breakdown of a proposed menu structure and a well-considered approach to inventory management. Roy Cassini’s third place entry introduced context-specific help as a way of both orienting the new user to the interface and to Second Life.

The judges were hard pressed to determine a winner. Vincent Nacon, Damien Fate and McCabe Maxsted each submitted entries that contributed insight and ideas that could go a long way to making the experience of Second Life (and by extension openSim) more intuitive and user-friendly. Vint Falken, Eristic Strangelove, Ordinal Malaprop and Keystone Bouchard, the contest judges, deserve a special thanks for evaluating the entries. At Metanomics, where the winners were announced, Adam Frisby followed the presentations with a discussion of Xenki, a viewer that is in the early stages of demonstrating that virtual worlds can be rendered in a browser. As Adam pointed out, when it comes to the interface, more choice is a good thing, and he envisioned a day when users can select a viewer, and then tailor that viewer’s “skin” and menus to their particular needs. What’s clear is that the talents of the community, whether the contestants who thought through the user-facing interface, or the initiatives within the openSim community, are putting passion and effort into the continued improvement of the virtual world experience.

The panel at Metanomics suggested that support by Linden Lab through the articulation of a long-term road map for the viewer and interface will further help to focus the efforts of resident developers, along with ways to improve the integration of patches. While the viewer is one piece in the larger puzzle of improving the new user experience and increasing retention, clearly there are ideas, energy and a devoted resident community willing and actively participating in this process.