Waiting for marketplace.secondlife.com...

If you've ever had the misfortune to use the Second Life Marketplace, you'll have spent much time staring at these words down in the bottom left-hand corner of the screen: "Waiting for marketplace.secondlife.com..."

I've finally completed something I've been putting off for ages: updating the Jeepers Marketplace. This is no insignificant task. I have almost 400 different products to be entered into the Marketplace system. And each step of this process is made more tedious and laborious because of the ill thought-out design of the Second Life Marketplace.

Take the Manage Listings page. Marketplace allows you to have up to 100 items per page. Fine. But why place the "Next Page" button at the foot of the page, instead of at the top of the page? Do I really have to scroll down through every item, on every page, just to click the Next button? This is bad page layout, and there's no excuse for it.

Here's another example: Why does the first column in Inventory default to the Date going from earliest to the most recent entries? This is not the most convenient or useful way to order a list. Now, listings can be ordered differently, but it has to be done every time the page is updated. This is when those words appear "Waiting for marketplace.secondlife.com..." Why can't items be re-ordered permanently in a way that suits the user?

Here's another completely unnecessary step that could have been eliminated with good design: Every time you want to upload an image, you are taken first to this insert:-

This pop-up informs you of the requirements for uploading an image: minimum and recommended dimensions, aspect ration and file type. Important information, but do we need to be reminded of it every time we upload an image? Only after we "Click here to select an image to upload" are you allowed to proceed.

I have always enjoyed the time I've spent working in Second Life. There's a certain amount of virtual physical labor exerted in the creation process. This is as it should be. A lot of that time is spent moving objects around on the screen, using the keyboard and mouse. Second Life was built on the untold millions of hours that individuals have spent creating this incredibly rich, diverse world. I like the fact that there is an investment of time spent in creating objects in-world; that is as it should be. For without effort, what merit has reward?

Which is why marketplace is such an insult to users. Every wasted click in Marketplace is a click I could have used doing something else in Second Life. This seems transparently obvious, and leads inexorably to the conclusion that the people at Linden Labs don't give a shit about Second Life's users, otherwise they wouldn't have created such a crappy Marketplace. QED.