Ever heard of sport stacking? Follow that hyperlink and come right back: watching videos of it is truely as amazing as it sounds. You know where I see a big hole? The fact there's no equivalent in Second Life.
I'm aware (many times over) how far-fetched that sounds. "What relevant connection could there possibly be?" It's as simple as an iMac: think of many video games that rely on hand-eye coordination. Razor-sharp, laser-fast reflexes are required, or at least significantly help, to succeed. Second Life, by its unvirtue of relatively average low FPS (frames per second)—a "tradition" I hope to continue to observe shedding—doesn't really have quite a lot of room for first-person shooters. When gameplay gets stuttery, the experience is ruined.
So let's look at basic, textual elements: one common experience in SL is having a window full of Instant Messages. I've been there lots, perhaps you have too. Perhaps you've had so many that they crawl off the right side of the screen and you have to resort to clicking dinky little arrows, which appears to be the complete antithesis of AOL Triton's smooth autoscrolling—and I mention this because it is something I dearly wish for. Or something like it.
Leaving room for improvements in the pipeline, let's look at the present: to date, there have been no major usability tests done on the IM user interface that I'm aware of. What'd rock like a champ? Having computers placed side by side, perhaps in a configuration comparable to the Nintendo-saturated showdown in The Wizard sans the Power Gloves, and get Liaisons and Live Helpers at it. Very quickly, flaws will make themselves apparent as you go past, say, half a dozen IMs at a time. Which leaves a lot of room for streamlining usability.
And beyond this, what is there?
I see IM juggling as just what it sounds like: it's a feat of dexterity, an art. And involves the sciences too. Different Resis have various approaches to laying out their IM window. Mine is stretched across the whole top part of my monitor, and perhaps takes up 1/4 the vertical space. I've also remapped the keyboard shortcut to open it to Ctrl-Space, because Ctrl-T is just such a tiny target that it slows me down. Saving, shaving milliseconds is what matters here.
Just like a piano without knives between the keys, you want to play the UI like an instrument: you want it to work with you, not against you. Truer words were never spoken.
We definitely need ways to tab between open IMs. Windows and Mac both have their Ctrl-Tab and Cmd-Tab, respectively. Holding down shift during that combo puts you in reverse so there's no need to scroll through the whole list again.
(And there are the heavyweights: chat logging, which has become ubiquitous and expected in today's market. Privacy concerns? It's a tool. Leave it off by default, inform a new Resi what it does, and let them make their own informed decision. Keeping records of your own private conversations, especially when so many important things are said and "serious" usages of SL are amassing, is necessary. I often have to refer to my own copied-and-pasted meeting logs in order to… blog!)
So let's fast forward: the Second Life World IM Championships. Can you imagine Dance Dance Revolution-like videos of these tournaments? Perhaps we aren't even so far today: there is FRAPS, you know. Maybe I'll be so lucky as to receive a video of one of our speed-answerers.
I can see it now: an onslaught of the keyboards, all eyes glued to the blinking—better yet, pulsing, throbbing, glowing—tabs, expanding like a fractal mass of sharded polygonal forms, touching on tastes and topics across the gridverse. And quick. Just like sport stacking. Dispatching help like Wu-Tang liquid swords.
If it comes, count on me being here to congratulate our winners.