I have twin passions when it comes to websites, and especially sites built in Flash—storytelling and usability.
Both these things were essentially ignored by most web designers for much the web’s early days, as they tussled with shifting standards, rapidly evolving tools, and the sheer hard work of building good sites. But now, with better software tools and standards the software makers are beginning to support in their products, it looks like storytelling and usability are beginning to get the attention they’ve always deserved.
The Inevitable Over-reactions.
That can only be a good thing, and one essential to the survival of web design firms as corporate clients take a long hard look at the low-content, flashy but seriously unusable websites they somehow became saddled with. A few such clients have over-reacted to these websites by committee, looked at how much money went down the drain, and concluded that all websites are a waste of time.
Nothing could be further from the truth. You might have come across a few of these people already. I have. And a few of them have also wrongfully concluded that Flash was the culprit to blame for their imperfect websites.
That is like blaming cars for all the deaths on the road each year. Ban cars and you stop road accidents, right? Ban Flash and the CEO will no longer see red and blast steam out of his ears. And that ridiculous response is what has happened in more than a few cases.
Time To Rescue Flash.
It is time to rescue this wonderful medium—Flash—from the over-reactors and from designers’ egos. Flash has always been capable of so much more than the uses its users have been putting it to. But far too often designers have used it pointlessly, like building the very appropriately named skip intros.
They’re called that because that’s what every user does—skip the damned things. Designers make them simply because they can. All skip intros do is serve as an ego wank, and prevent people from getting to the real content of the website. This website has a skip intro weighing in at 997K! Admittedly the site is a special case, a venue for showing off the designers’ considerable skills to other designers with ultrafast connections.
But, I have seen a few skip intros almost the same size on several corporate websites in the past.
Damned Smart Book Titling.
By naming their Flash usability book Skip Intro authors Michelangelo Capraro and Duncan McAlester acknowledge that designers have been stroking their own egos to excess.
They cover that issue at the book’s onset, then explain their own methods and especially their successful use of user personas, as defined by interface design guru Alan Cooper. Then they go on to present us with the code and tutorials to build a number of interface elements that you can reuse in pretty much any Flash project, and should.
What I like About It.
When I was commissioning designers to build websites I’d always make a point of relating my theory of web interface design, especially in relation to new visitors to a site.
My theory is that new site users should not be forced to spend valuable time learning an interface you’ve cooked up just for that project. I’d also point out the flaws of traditional third-generation HTML website interfaces.
Instead I would encourage my designers to use Flash, which I prefer to DHTML and HTML for the fact that Flash looks and works the same in every web browser regardless, and use it to build interface elements based on the one interface every computer uses each and every day—their computer’s graphical user interface (GUI).
Tool tips, drop-down menus, contextual menus, button click sounds for audio feedback—people interact with these things every day and know what their meaning is.
My Old and New Vision for the Web.
From long before the Web and in the earliest days of the Internet, when I used to sneak into the university Physics computing facility, I had a vision of communicating with what I called deep text in dense pages made of text, images, animation, movies and sound.
I wasn’t quite sure of what that entailed, and whether it would exist on TV or computers. When Director and competing early CD-ROM multimedia products came along I didn’t know anybody doing that kind of thing. But now that Flash is here, and after ActionScript made its appearance, I knew this was the dense page building tool for me.
By the way, most of those designers just laughed at my ideas, and said they knew better and that people want to play around with groovy new and utterly unfamiliar interfaces that are different in every website. Yeah, right. Maybe for when they visit games sites, or are playfully exploring experimental websites meant to show off a designer’s inventions. But not when they are visiting a site where they need to get something done easily and fast.
Put your ego back in the box, or wherever it is you keep it, when you are designing sites for clients.
I’m Working It: So Should You.
The days of executive jobs in large organizations that could afford to hire in specialists as you need them are no longer here. They may come again, and I hope they do, but for the time being I am having to do everything, and be everything.
Right now, I am working through a pile of Flash books to acquire the deep skills I could previously hire someone in for. Skip Intro is helping me shortcut that process by a huge margin with its code and tutorials on how to build the elements I have been wanting in Flash all along.
Components are an exciting new feature in Flash MX, and component versions of these elements are provided on the book’s CD. I am enjoying using them, and all Flash MX’s other improvements, as I work through the book.
Finally, a word of praise and one minor complaint. I am so pleased that New Riders has made the book site’s URL clearly visible on the back cover. So many books have their own websites now, but far too many of them make it damned hard to find the address.
My complaint? This book is too short! I want more! Gimme, gimme.
The Book:
The Chapters:
- Introduction
- Bad Flashers Anonymous
- Basic Training
- Section I: Höpart Bothur Exhibit Site
- Overview—A Comfortable Situation
- A Good Experience from the Start
- Scrolling Without Boundaries
- Section II: GroceryClick.com Site Design
- Overview—Convenience in a Flash
- Tabbed Windows—Convenient Access to Supplementary Information
- Needles and Haystacks—Site Searches
- Section III: Wind-Automata Developer Site
- Overview—A Familiar Setting
- A Simple Hierarchy
- Tool Tips—Know Before You Go
- The End…
- Appendix A: What Every Interface Designer Should Know
- Appendix B: Usability Resources
- Appendix C: Flash and Design Resources
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