[thelist] flash detection

[John Dowdell]

At 5:01 PM 5/7/1, Mike Hardaker wrote:
> I still feel that a far more interesting question (technically
> unanswerable, I know) is how many *want to*.

Thank you for that little parenthesis, Mike... without that I would have
wilted, I'm sure.... ;-)

It's probably difficult to measure overall satisfaction with an individual
web page, both from difficulties with a measuring device, and also from the
difficulty in isolating variables within a page.

All I've got is the admittedly soft by-products of the number of people who
have viewing capabilites and the wide variety of sites which employ this.
By this it seems that people "want to", but I couldn't venture a
percentage, sorry.

(Agreed about the effects on all of bad sites, too... it's hard to measure
diffuse negative externalities, but that doesn't mean they don't exist.)


Sidenote: SWF usage is quite diverse... eyecandy stuff does often suck,
true... the predictable interactivity in navigation and more advanced
systems is another beast entirely. I feel as uneasy lumping static and
dynamic SWFs together as I would static and dynamic HTMs.

Bottom line: Compellingly conveying your client's message to their intended
audience is the name of the game. Rich approaches add to the "compelling"
part, but this may or may not be suitable to the client, to the message, to
the intended audience. Finding the best balance point for a given
conversation is the key.



(Deke, check NPD's methodology papers... their Online Panels are
representative consumer samples with a 95% confidence level. No
sub-sampling is ever perfect, true, but this one seems pretty good.)


jd




John Dowdell, Macromedia Tech Support, San Francisco CA US
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