More than a million items of merchandise
With its own currency, the Linden Dollar, Second Life supports a vibrant economy that enables users to create, sell, and buy virtual goods. To bring further growth to this economy, Linden Lab acquired a marketplace, XStreetSL, which offered unique virtual merchandise, with more than one million items from more than 40,000 merchants (think Etsy for the virtual world).

Sleek shopping and selling
The shopping and selling experiences were not meeting the needs of customers and needed an entire overhaul, including user interaction and visual design. The marketplace had to reflect Second Life’s brand and integrate with the overall Second Life website. To balance the marketplace’s user experience against Linden Lab’s global organizational goals, a broad exploration of the brand was needed. That exploration resulted in evolving the brand expression of the Second Life site and simplifying its navigation.

The newly designed and engineered solution created by Hot Studio and engineering partner Pivotal Labs produced a Second Life marketplace that exhibits the sleek, professional look and inviting experience.

Five months to a premier design
The new site’s design enhances the Linden Lab brand and sports integral e-commerce features, such as a shopping cart, search filters, integrated wish lists, and better display of products and their variations. All this, including the migration of existing data and user accounts, was accomplished in the rapid timeframe of five months from the initial design kick-off.