Macromedia's Flash is an amazing
technology. It can bring a boring Web surfing experience to life
through sound and animation, all in a short download. Though Flash
is deservedly considered a killer application, is it usable?
In October
2000, usability guru Jakob Nielsen published an article on his Web
site entitled, "Flash:
99% Bad." He stated that, "Although multimedia has
its role on the Web, current Flash technology tends to discourage
usability for three reasons: It makes bad design more likely; it
breaks with the Web's fundamental interaction style; and it
consumes resources that would be better spent enhancing a site's
core value."
Let's assess
whether the reasons he gives still hold true three years later.
Does Flash encourage
bad design?
Nielsen's
report detailed three distinct abuses of Flash design: overuse of
animation, decrease in user control, and nonstandard GUI controls.
Many Web designers are still guilty of these three charges. More
and more Web sites are overly animated with less obvious controls.
Many designers
used to use Flash to add a neat effect to a page; now these
designers are using Flash as a tool to create the page entirely.
This shift has created a series of nonreadable and hyperactive Web
sites that act more like music videos than places to receive
information.
Does Flash break Web
fundamentals?
Flash is still
not completely standard. Despite being pre-installed on some
operating systems, you have to download the Flash plug-in to use
it. Regardless of how small it is to download, as long as the
plug-in is around, this is a strike against Flash's usability
record.
Though you can
still find fundamental faults with Flash, here are several areas
that have shown improvement:
- The ability to create dynamic controls
that allow for the instantaneous manipulation of text size,
animation speed, and sound controls, which enables users to
adjust settings to their liking.
- Flash MX (the latest version of Flash)
supports controls for a Back button.
- Macromedia completely revamped the
capability to search within a Flash document, and now you can
get excellent search results.
Does Flash distract
from a site's core values?
The prevalence
of Flash designers and the introduction of Flash MX has enabled
Flash to become more useful to the core values of a typical Web
site construction.
One reason for
this is that Flash is now more technologically able to provide
updated content without the need for a Flash programmer. Also,
Flash is now powerful enough to actually be the main application
that delivers the content instead of just the unique messenger.
The verdict
It's obvious
that Flash technology has changed a lot since 2000. Flash MX
actually helps solve the problems once associated with Flash and
usability with its new features and range of uses.
However, I
believe there's still validity to Nielsen's three points. He just
might want to update his article title from "Flash: 99%
Bad" to read "Flash: 50% Bad."
