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I’ve been having a good flash rant bubbling in me for for some time now. I should start by saying that I do one or two flash projects a month and that I like flash and I think when done well is a great tool. The problem I have with flash is that it’s often used an excuse to throw the rules of usability out the window. I came across this site and I saw a perfect example of how not implement flash. Using that site as an example here is my list of what to avoid when using flash.

1. Screen size expands to take over your monitor
I hate this, I clicked on the link and BOOM my browser resizes. The reason browsers resize is not so you can take up as much screen real estate as you want, they resize so that people can surf the web regardless of their monitor resolution. This is something I’ll say again and again in the coming points. Never make your user do something they don’t want to do. Especially since the content of your website is pretty small to begin with there is no reason to make the browser bigger.

2. Intro movies
This was very popular when flash first sprouted up but has more less died away on most sites. I’m not going to go into detail about this.

3. Form to fill out before seeing the content
After the intro movie there is a form where you fill out some personal information, Name, email etc. before you have seen any content to know what your signing up for. This could be signing me up for telephone service for all I know, I haven’t seen the site yet, I don’t know who you are, why should I hand over my phone number. There is a skip button, but again they are trying to make the user do something they do not want to do. It may seem like a good idea to cultivate a mailing list, but really if you trick someone into signing up, that person is going to toss your emails into a spam folder as soon as they get it and not only have you lost a conversion but you have probably angered a potential customer.

4. Intro movie after the form
WHAT! Are you kidding me! I just watched an intro commercial with no skip button, don’t make me do this again. Two times, I have never, and I mean NEVER seen this before. There is a skip button but you might not notice because you will be franticly trying to find a way to turn off the awful music playing in the background. Which leads me to my next point.

5. Background music
Just because you can play music in flash doesn’t mean you should. In fact you shouldn’t, unless your a band or a music site. Computer’s are multimedia devices and a lot of visitors to your site might already be watching a video or listening to their own music. To slap on some loud royalty free techno loop on your site is not cool and probably never was. When the music, which was at least twice as loud as what I was already listening to, came on I literally swore out loud and ripped off my headphones in pain. I don’t think that was what the designer was going for.

6. Gratuitous background animation
It’s the flash version of the animated gif. You know those flashing green and red banner ads on websites that make it impossible to focus on the content you are trying to read? That’s what’s going on here, so much movement that it’s distracting and adds nothing to the site. It’s not obnoxious, but it’s distracting. National City relaunched their website this week. Go check that out and see how they do background animation in flash. The image loads quickly and then the animation stops. There is a very subtle animation on the links that invite you to roll over them. Then once the user makes the decision to roll over the links you get a really cool animation effect. It really adds to the site. I should also point out that each link is clearly label so you don;t have to guess which link to roll over.

7. Unique navigation
The links on this site aren’t big and easy to see they are in a scroll box under the big group of rotating images above. Yup, the only way to navigate the site is to scroll through a tiny box filled with options. This is better than my biggest peev, the navigation that moves to the right or left when you move your mouse to click it. Man that drives me up a wall, and off a site.

8. Pop ups
Once you go through all this work to get to what you came to the site to see in the first place it launches a pop up window with what a mostly html website in it. Why? Why not just put that html directly on the page in the first place. From there the site is pretty easy to navigate. Within the popup there are easy to see link on the left to all the content.

Well, there it is. I’m glad I got that off my chest. Jakob Nielsen would be proud.

Tags: design, flash, usability