This article was published in the January 2008 issue (Vol 13, No. 2)

About the Author

Sean Williams, Ph.D. is the Associate Dean of the Graduate School at Clemson University and an Associate Professor for their Department of English.

STC UUX Community Newsletter
Usability Interface

Usability in 3-D Virtual Worlds

By Sean D. Williams, Clemson University Academic Co-Director, Carolinas Virtual World Consortium

Introduction

Blogs, Wikis, Facebook, Myspace, and now there's "Second Life," "There," "Qwaq," and a host of other 3-dimensional (3D) virtual worlds for socializing, gaming, learning, and doing just about anything else that a real person can do. As you may know, especially if you're a Second Life resident, IBM has a 24-hour, staffed support center in Second Life; Best Buy's Geek Squad has a support island in Second Life; and Sweden opened a virtual "embassy" in Second Life last spring. And that's just Second Life.

What happens when we, the information experts, don't control the information anymore? What happens when a community constructs the information about a product or task? And what happens when we can't organize information according to users' cognitive maps anymore because they can "fly" and literally see the entire information space at once? Or what happens when they choose to "walk" that way when we wanted them to walk this way? Do our information architectures break down when the information becomes truly spatial rather than an abstract hierarchy that we can predict through a card sort?

I'd like to address these issues and some others in this article to begin a discussion about usability in 3-D virtual worlds, and, in particular, to investigate whether or not 3-D virtual worlds present usability professionals with a new set of challenges or whether they just restate long-standing ones. In short, do these new spaces and 3-D virtual worlds in particular, present usability professionals with a new set of challenges because they don't work differently from other media?

First, Let's Get Our Nomenclature Settled

Digital virtual worlds, in one form or another, have been around for a very long time (speaking in technology years) and date at least back to the 1970s. But the first digital virtual worlds were not 3-D, were not even 2-D really. The first virtual worlds like multi-user dungeons (MUDs) relied on text and users' imaginations to create the world. MUDs were joined by multi-user, object oriented (MOOs) in the 1980s, which allowed for more integrated collaborative activities and file sharing, but were still primarily text-based.

By the mid 1990s, 2-D graphical virtual worlds like "The Palace" (www.thepalace.com) joined the virtual world universe offering users a more graphical world then they had experienced before. Admittedly, the first graphical worlds were pretty primitive by the standards our processors allow today, but even early worlds like The Palace or Cybertown (www.cybertown.com) encouraged users to express their individuality by creating interesting avatars and exploring different locations. As processor speeds and graphic cards improved in the early 2000s, and with the exploding gaming industry, online 3-dimensional worlds became more and more commonplace and eventually developed into the complex, sophisticated 3-D virtual worlds we have now. In some cases, worlds such as Second Life and There, which can actually look very real.

I replay this selective history because it's important to distinguish between "virtual world" and "three-dimensional virtual worlds." While wikis, blogs, MUDs, MOOs, e-mail, IM, and websites are all part of the "virtual world," they are not necessarily part of the 3-D virtual world, which is characterized by users appearing to move in a visual space that has depth (the Z axis). However, the 3-D world can, and usually does, employ the other virtual world technologies to enable interactions, accomplish work, or present information.

Witness, for example, the integration of IM-style chat in Second Life, or the ability to browse websites and collaboratively manipulate documents within the Qwaq interface. So, categorically 3-D virtual worlds might be viewed as a metacategory of electronic virtual worlds since they can contain the other digital technologies. Our concern here is not THE virtual world as often conceived by just online technologies; rather our concern is one specific type of virtual world that a llows users to appear to travel as they would in real space along the X, Y, or Z axes.

How Does a 3-D Virtual World Challenge Models of Usability?

Human factors and ergonomics professionals have long known that people operate in a three-dimensional space. Likewise, architects and museum curators have always been concerned with the ways that people flow through the built environment. But usability, one might argue, hasn't been concerned with these issues, especially when we think of usability as applied to information products. We might look at "flows of information" or "document design" or even "information architecture," but strictly speaking, most of us don't concern ourselves with bodies moving in space and designing those spaces for the optimum level of information retrieval, retention, and usage.

Conceptually, though, don't the questions we ask about a 3-D space closely parallel those we ask of any information product? Who are the users? What are the users' tasks? Can the user recover from errors? How will users employ the information they seek? What is the context of use? And how do we design our communication products for integration into that context? How do we aid retention, recall, and scannability?

All of these questions apply as much in a 3-D virtual world as they do in 2-D, paper, or screen-based environments. But there are two differences of note in 3-D virtual worlds that will challenge us. The first difference is that users are not "users", they are participants. The second difference is in the nature of 3-D, requiring a different navigation paradigm, because the information is spatial, not conceptual.

Let's take a look at each of these in turn.

Navigation and Design are Spatial, not Conceptual

In a typical information architecture, we draw hierarchical, nested trees of information, often represented by outlines containing logically numbered sections (1.1, 1.1.1, 1.1.2, 1.2, etc.). Alternatively, we might represent a document's or help system's structure with a tree diagram, or topical storyboard. In any of these cases, the structure limits what users can see at any moment based on a cognitive picture of the information's structure that we hope matches how users will need or access the information. It's a purely abstract-albeit tested and reliable-method of organizing information. Three dimensional spaces, however, are not abstract or cognitive in the same way, because people navigate in "space" using their sense of how the "real" world works: go left, climb stairs, enter the room, fly to the roof, etc.

Consequently, information design becomes more like a shopping mall where users have to remember that this bit of information is "down the hall to the left", but that bit of information is "across the hall, through the doors, past the fountain and behind the blue door." While we traditionally speak about online media as "places" (with its roots in the classical rhetorical concept of "topoi", or memory places), this way of describing online spaces is truly a metaphor and a fiction as well because there is no correlation to physical geography.

By comparison, in 3-D virtual worlds, information really does reside at an "address" and therefore navigation and recall utilize different skills than navigating other online media. Those usability professionals with a background in cognitive psychology will immediately recognize the implications of this subtle difference because visual/spatial skills do not necessarily equate to verbal/narrative skills. Visual/spatial skills accord with our real, lived experiences moving around trees and rocks and driving to the eye doctor's office where there is a visceral sense of the world that helps locate us. By comparison, verbal/narrative skills are purely abstract with no basis in the physical world. So, the question for usability professionals becomes something like, "how do we build meaningful information structures that will map onto users' expectations about where they would find different types of information?"

For example, are single, topically-structured rooms with all of the information about a single subject "hanging on the walls" the way to organize information? If so, what goes on the left, on the right, up the stairs, or down the stairs? And do you build the space to encourage a user to progress in a certain path from right to left, or downstairs to upstairs? Or should you even encourage a path in worlds that were originally designed to be exploratory, much like early experimental hypertext? What affordances do we employ to physically guide an avatar to the information they need? And how can we present that information in a way that they will retain and be able to use it? Does the media richness of 3-D spaces increase the motivation and engagement of users, resulting in increased learning or, at minimum, increased affective ratings? What is the best balance between efficiency, affect, and affordance in a 3-D space that, by the nature of the medium, requires more than just expedience? These are just some of the questions that usability professionals will probably begin to face as we become more involved in testing and designing these 3-D spaces.

Users are Not "Users;" They are Participants

A close relative to the idea that 3-D virtual worlds encourage exploration is the concept of social presence. In other words, 3-D worlds are most successful when multiple people interact simultaneously in a shared space. In this way, 3-D worlds resemble blogs and social networking spaces like Facebook, or even Wikipedia, where multiple people converge around a topic (or person). The difference, though, is that 3-D world users prefer synchronous interaction, more like Instant Messenger than email, and the most successful spaces encourage the participants themselves to structure the information around a topic. This model might challenge some usability professionals and information designers who are used to "presenting" the information to an "audience." In 3-D worlds, there really is no "audience" as such. Instead, users in the space expect to be able to collaborate in the construction of meaning around a topic rather than being presented with a topic "to read" or "to learn." In this model, people become participants in the creation of knowledge rather than users who consume the knowledge that others have prepared.

Obviously, this is fraught with complications for information usability. But who among us hasn't gone to a newsgroup or discussion board when presented with a technological problem of our own? In many ways, 3-D worlds are like visiting the chat rooms or calling the help desk because we can communicate with real people in real time. The difference, though, between the help desk and the 3-D world is that the people we're talking to might or might not be experts, in which case we might receive, at various times, more or less useful information. But the fact remains that in 3-D virtual worlds, this collaborative spirit is king, and people expect to be asked and given advice and information. Constructivist learning theory suggests that collaboration is the best way to learn and stay engaged in a topic, so for usability professionals the questions might come to revolve less around how well our spaces present information for users to consume, and more around how well our spaces encourage participation. If a space is collaborative with diverse viewpoints, the information will probably be pretty good, just as it is on Wikipedia where members regularly review one anothers' information and provide feedback and corrections.

The difference between Wikipedia and a 3-D world, though, centers on time and space: how do you archive and capture the knowledge generated in synchronous interaction and then make that available for the future? How do you keep the 3-D world from becoming nothing more than a glorified chat room where people collect in a space to discuss some topic? Or is that even a good thing? How do we enable participation and confirm that our spaces make the best use of the potential of collaboratively constructed knowledge? These are just a few of the questions that arise from the participatory values that users bring to 3-D worlds. How do we capitalize on this value for creating usable information?

Closing Thoughts

Three-dimensional virtual worlds are here to stay. And, much like the rise in use of the World Wide Web, the amount of activity in these spaces is increasing exponentially as technology improves and people explore the possibilities of the medium. What I hope this brief article accomplishes is to begin a conversation about what these worlds might mean for usability. Certainly, we have lots of tools, techniques and values that translate just as well into 3-D virtual worlds as they do into other media. Indeed, just as the transition from paper to electronic to Web-based communication demonstrated, much of what we already do applies to the new kid on the block, too. But as we learned from this evolution, there are a few things we don't know and we need to begin thinking about the unique questions that this medium poses for usability professionals. I'm not sure if I'm asking the right questions or characterizing the medium fairly. I do know, though, that there are new usability challenges inherent to 3-D worlds that we haven't even discovered yet, and I look forward to the conversations and debates about what those challenges might be.

Additional Resources

For more information about virtual worlds click here.