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Chapter 7 - Flash - Use it Right!

Lightbulb BalloonFlash Good or Flash Bad?
Macromedia Flash technology generates a tremendous amount of ambivalence. You love it. You hate it. You love it again. It gives you freedom and control, but it stops your back button from working. It gives you freedom and control, but none of your pages show up on search engines. It gives you freedom and control, but your site traffic goes down exponentially as soon as you put your Flash site up.

What's going on here?

Flash, at its simplest, provides a way to display bandwidth-efficient vector graphics on the web. It's an animation tool, allowing you to stretch, compress and move those graphics, bringing life to web sites.

Here are some of my flash pieces.

Add Flash Action Scripting, and it becomes possible to build sophisticated cross-platform web applications which include motion graphics, video, audio, two-way communications, and complex forms.

It requires a plug-in, or player, but the Flash player is already installed on perhaps 90% of web browsers.

Why it's great

The Problem with Flash

The "Skip Intro."
Remember David Siegel and his wonderful 1996 web site with wrinkled lined paper and post-it notes? He came up with the idea, brilliant in its first incarnation, of having an "Entry Tunnel" into web sites.

Everyone started making entry tunnels, which quickly became single splash pages, familiar territory to us. They're like magazine covers.

But web surfers are an impatient lot, and when you've seen the splash page once, you don't especially need to see it again. So designers began putting a little button on the Intro to let you skip past it into the main site.

Here's an example of an embarrassingly bad Flash Intro I once made. The client made me do it. Really.

Eventually, seasoned designers and their clients realized that if you have to say "Skip Intro," you should just skip the intro.

However, Splash pages have great vanity appeal to clients, and it is pretty hard to tell them they shouldn't want one.

The All-Flash Site
Macromedia has been hard at work repositioning Flash as an application builder, and a self-contained application all done in Flash could deliver a high level of sophisticated interactivity, particularly if the application requires sound or video.

Here's a good technical overview from the site of the book publisher, O'Reilly.

Here is an example of a Flash web application:

But if the main purpose of the site is to deliver text and picture information, HTML works a lot better.

One client I know of took down a large site with much useful research-oriented information on it and put an all-Flash site up. The effect was of a moving billboard. Finding information on the site became extremely frustrating - it was slow to arrive and when it got to the screen, it was all high-level marketing platitudes. It may have gotten the designer many subsequent jobs, but the web traffic on that site fell to nearly zero.

The clever designer now mixes HTML and Flash, using Flash for only part of the page, making sure it supports the goals of the client, and does not subvert the normal browser controls of the site's visitors.

Usability Tips

Some of my Flash pieces:

 

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