I have been developing with Flash for the last four years. Nonetheless, my philosophy is that if something can be done outside of Flash, it should. However, due to the fact that HTML was never designed to handle rich media (video, audio, vector-base imagery, motion, etc.), the overwhelming majority of rich media delivery cannot be done on the HTML layer. This becomes abundantly obvious due to the plethora of length tutorials on how to round corners or put a drop-shadow on a rectangle. In fact, I would argue that Flash is the ONLY way to deliver rich media - all other technologies (Windows Media Player, Quicktime, Real, etc.) are not only less pervasive on the internet, they are infinitely less flexible. The whole UGC (user-generated content) revolution would not have happened without Flash technologies pushing the content to viewers. Flash made this happen. Not standards (have you taken a look at YouTube’s HTML?), not AJAX, but Flash. I am not trying to diminish the necessity for web standards or AJAX, but many of the standards-manics seem to have their heads in the sand as to what Flash-enabled sites are achieving. In my opinion, the people that are still clenching onto the archaic notion that Flash is not necessary are diluting the discussion on web standards. Rather than deny its merits and accomplishments, why not work to push it further into the circle of accessibility and standards? No one wants technology and progress to be stifled in the name of standardization.

With Flash you have a plugin in which nearly 100% of users have at least some version of the player on their system. The makers have been working to make the technology much more accessible (can you say the same for Windows Media Player or Quicktime?). In addition, Flash allows things to be done that HTML/CSS/Javascript will NEVER be able to do barring some paradigm shift in the technologies. We hear quite a bit about how Flash is not as accessible as HTML/CSS/Javascript - ironically, the same people that are trying to replace Flash with extremely complex AJAX applications are nearly 200Kb of Javascript for the libraries alone (scriptaculous and prototype are roughly 190Kb combined). I developed the Current TV video player which stands at roughly 54Kb. A more basic and generic version of the same application could easily be under 20Kb. I am the first person to suggest keeping as much in HTML as possible. I am also one of the largest proponents of well-used AJAX. That being said, it is simply obtuse to attempt certain things outside of Flash - here are a few examples:

• Advanced visualizations
• Advanced motion treatment
• Physics engines
• Projects where visual typographic control is paramount
• Video or audio playback
• Video or audio recording through a webcam
• Rich-media browser based games
• All of the above occurring simultaneously

Ironcially, when you add up all the traffic from fringe browsers which are incompatible with the highly used Javascript libraries, it comes very close to the amount of users without the Flash player…

I would highly suggest giving Flash a serious second look. There are many new features that offer more accessible-centric options for development and design. Flash 8 and above offers new features for talking with Javascript - giving the potential for all interactive elements to be in standard HTML with Flash simply being the display. The express-install feature allows viewers to upgrade their version of Flash from the SWF on your own site - making upgrading much easier and much less cumbersome of a task. You are most likely going to find a lot of features which open the door to accessibility on the web.

I have no doubt the anti-flash standards folks mean well. That being said, should we not be devoting our energy towards making this technology more seamless throughout the browsing experience rather than pretend that it will just go away? And honestly, if it did somehow go away, would the web be a better place because of it?

Share This

Share This

Past Mistakes by the Design Community

Rutledge suggests that designers have inside knowledge on how to create experiences that lead to the productive use of a site. If designers had inside knowledge about user experience, then scientific studies analyzing user interaction with interfaces would not have any substantive findings to the contrary. The studies would have found that all those well designed sites performed swimmingly and everyone would have gone home. However, we, the web design community, have found an innumerable amount of internet users have been left perplexed and frustrated.

Like many other human beings, we address issues from an egocentric point of view, i.e., if I understand it, then everyone must as well. Through the years, designers have learned that all those great ideas we had about how to improve the user experience including splash pages, flash intros and pop-ups sites, to name a few, were not so great after all. We know now that the public detests those design elements due to, you guessed it, statistical data. I can see many designers saying, “Those design elements were done by bad designers”. If our job is so subjective, who gets to decipher the good from the bad design? I would argue that we already use very objective arguments to judge a design/designer’s success. To be fair, these poor design choices were not really our fault - no one had any idea what they were doing. The internet was budding and there was not a user’s manual to follow. Web designers did the best we could, we took chances, but ultimately we ended up, doing as much good as we did bad. Still, no harm, no foul, this experimentation helped move design on the web forward - we just need to learn from our mistakes. How better to learn from our mistakes than utilizing research and objective data? Invaluable data can be extrapolated to give us a glimpse into how people use our site, potential problems with different facets and the before/after results after changes were made. We cannot read the minds of our audience. Fortunately, we have a record that may give us a clue as to what they were thinking. If our job is to communicate and to create a visual construct that facilitates various goals, we would be foolish to not have that data be an integral part of our design process.

Measuring Design Success (and Failure) Quantitatively

Designers need to consider the full picture as part of design, including how users interact with the site, navigate through information, different sections, etc. Numbers and data become important when taking these elements into account. There is no doubt that numbers can be a very humbling power on a designer. However, if the goal for a particular project is to increase traffic/exposure to a particular area of a site and the results show the traffic has gone down, the design has failed. Period. It does not matter how much better the site looks, if certain tangible goals were expected to be met from a new design and the numbers show a negative response, the design did not succeed.

Numbers can give us an idea what we are doing right or wrong. What the numbers cannot always tell us is how to improve or fix the design. Any statistic can be twisted, this is true. However, using that argument to lessen the significance of statistics seems problematic when compared to the uncertainty of decisions made purely under subjective direction. Web statistics are not perfect by any means. Nonetheless, over long periods of time with a large enough segment to draw from, those numbers can begin to give amazing insight into patterns, trends and characteristics of your site. Those numbers are not going to give you a solution, however they can give you a metric to conclude that, a) you have a problem, b) you have fixed that problem or c) you have not fixed the problem.

Leave Your Ego At the Door

A large portion of web designers obviously did not understand what general users wanted. Ironically, it was the engineers that taught us. Websites like Google created unobtrusive, simple, function-centric sites that flourished while many of the behemoth, overdesigned sites (does Boo.com ring a bell?) slowly (or quickly) lost traction. We have learned from our lessons. Yet, the hubris of saying we designers have some innate ability to know what users want that cannot be backed up with some level of objectivity creates the risk of repeating old mistakes. Rather, the analytical, statistical method of studying traffic trends, patterns and responses to site changes can give us a glimpse of how users actually interact with the site. The data provides designers with an invaluable tool to move forward in improving upon different areas of a site’s design.

I think we all know that getting users to interact with a site the way you want can be a lot like herding cats. You can spend months trying to put yourself in the mind of the user only to find that they are confused once they are brought into a usability session. Through years of trial and error, designers have a better idea of what works and what does not on the web. Yet, each site has a unique set of problems to solve. There is not going to be a whitepaper or usability study for every problem that needs solving for each project. We are definitely going to have to fly blind in some cases and use our “feel” to best address each issue. Nonetheless, the second quantitative data becomes available on those specific areas, we would be foolish to not only take it seriously, but to use it as a metric as to whether the proposed solution was, in fact, the right one.

We must be very clear - the visual style of a site is only the surface of its design - scratching beneath its surface should reveal much more thought and creative execution. If we consider the design process to stop at the visual level, then yes, our job immediately becomes much less about a synthesis of logical process and much more of a subjective feel. If that is the case, we are not doing much more than applying virtual wallpaper.

Future Mistakes to Make

Designers are still learning lessons about how to design traditional web interfaces more effectively. However, the web is still maturing at a frightening speed. When Flash first came out, we made sure to let our “feel” ruin people’s perception of the format for years. With AJAX taking a greater role in web interfaces everyday, we will, no doubt, allow our superior creative ability to create chaos once again. Honestly, that is OK - without experimentation the web would become quite a boring place. Nonetheless, we need to judge our experiments’ success and relevancy by objective figures on how users react. There are plenty of times when users can actually like the look and feel of the site and before they know it, unbeknownst to them, they find another website to fulfill their needs.

The Experience Site Loophole

Frankly, a large majority of websites on the internet are driven by goals that lend themselves nicely to numbers - increased traffic, increased registration, greater sales, more downloads. Experience sites are quite different. Since the site is less action-driven, getting “lost” for short periods of time may not always be a bad thing and possibly encourage deeper interaction due to its entertainment value. Hi Res! made a living on those sorts of sites with wild success. To be honest, experience sites are a designer’s dream come true as their desire for experimentation are not only asked for, but are necessary. Subjectivity here is king as these sites are almost always about feel and less about tangible actions for the user to commit. At the end of the day, we need to know what we are designing and why. Ultimately, we need to accept that experience sites are the exception to the rule and keep them in their proper context. We definitely can learn valuable design lessons from them, but we need to be aware that comparing them to most sites is like comparing apples to oranges.

Conclusion

Much of design on the internet is directed towards simple, tangible and recordable goals. Ultimately, those goals need to be gauged a success or failure based on objective data. Designers should tackle subjective problems with creative subjective solutions and tackle objective problems with creative objective solutions. Better yet, tackle both types of problems with both creative subjective and objective solutions. Nonetheless, you better have some objective results at the end of the day. Good design should produce positive tangible results well beyond a pretty exterior. If we have in fact achieved such goals, it is in our interest to tout such gains. Either way, it is not in our interest to ignore solid statistics - it ultimately hurts the client with a potentially sub par product and it denies the designer invaluable feedback and the possibility of growth.

Share This