Virtual Learning Worlds

This post might get a bit loopy. I’ve been thinking about this for a few days, and basically trying to flesh it out via a post (or more depending where this one goes).

I’ve been thinking a lot about interfaces lately. The good, the bad, and the ugly.

This somewhat builds from my post about Interface Design + Games. When I first started demonstrating World of Warcraft for people at work, they couldn’t get over how confusing the interface looked. Buttons everywhere, no labels, limited text on the screen, etc. “How in the world do you know what you’re doing?”. That’s part of where my idea for what I’m initially calling phased interfaces originated. When you start WoW for the first time and create a character, you literally have about 3-4 buttons you can press to perform some sort of action in the world. In addition to the limited buttons, you also have smart tool-tips that recognize what you’re interacting with, and provide you additional information (not uncommon in most games and software packages). As you progress through the game, you slowly accumulate more actions you can perform in the environment, and your interface starts to grow organically as you learn how to use your new abilities. In the end, your interface starts to look something like this:

I’m also playing Resident Evil 4 on my Wii. They take a similar approach in the form of “Player Manuals” that you access as you move through the game. Each manual illustrates how to use the Wii-mote to execute an action within the game. The further along you are, the more intricate and detailed the manuals become.

In gaming, this seems to be a great technique to bring in users who might not be that comfortable with the UI, and turn them into experts quickly as they move through the environment.

I started to wonder: what if Second Life took this approach? What if, upon creating an account, you were only provided a subset of the menu and interface items? For instance, maybe the building, scripting, and land ownership menus weren’t just grayed out, but totally removed? What if the building and scripting interface slowly built upon itself? You need to build a shape or two before you were presented with the edit shape tools, then you had to edit a few shapes before the environment gave you the tools to merge objects, etc.

Beyond Second Life, what if our LMS and CMS environments took this approach? What about software applications? It’s a fine line when we start to look at productivity software and applying this approach, but I think it would be worth experimenting.

This is learning at its finest in the manner in which games coach users how to actually play. As designers of elearning environments, we should be taking a very careful look at successful titles and how we can borrow strategies for teaching our students how to navigate and interact with our environments.

An interface should NEVER get in the way of the user, but enable her to navigate and interact efficiently.