[thelist] Jakob Nielsen /FLASH.

[martin.p.burns at uk.pwcglobal.com]

Memo from Martin P Burns of PricewaterhouseCoopers

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Subject:    Re: [thelist] Jakob Nielsen /FLASH.


>Don't be a bunch of squares. You all sound like you've been coding for the
>web since the Johnson administration.

In most places, this is called "Experience" and is considered A Good Thing,
because it lets you see past "I think this is cool".

>Loosen up and look at some great
>Flash:  http://skyscraper.paregos.com/

The Experiments page is kinda fun once you've worked out where the
navigation is. Not really much that's useful, but that's OK cos it's
experimental. It certainly says "We have technical ability"

Now let's look at what they do for clients.
Anti-aliased text which is too small to be legible on my LCD screen.
Mystery Meat Navigation which takes some time to discover (a) where it is
(it's normally at about 1px until you hover) and (b) won't let you see all
the choices at once.

Looking at the Renault example because it's the one which I'm best able to
understand what's appropriate for the target audience... making allowances
as my Swedish is near non-existent. I'm looking at the Laguna info.

It seems to be a mixture of Flash, dHTML and standard HTML running in a
popup window with no browser controls.

Well, it's nice plasma-screen-ware to leave running, particularly in the
showroom section. But it really feels like a movie which I have to sit and
watch (albeit in segments so I do have *some* control). In a showroom I'd
watch it while waiting for a sales person to stop ignoring me, but that's
about it. On the site, I got bored very quickly.

More mystery meat navigation on the right, although it's not too bad
because the icons are almost sensible, and you get labels when you mouse
over them.

No standard browser controls like a status bar, so I don't always know
what's going to happen when I click on stuff. Maybe it's more obvious if
you have the language. I opened a new window with it in which made life a
lot better.

Mostly though it's just static text presented as images (more reasonable as
the target audience is unlikely to be blind) and images that move because
they can. I'm not sure what value the Flash is adding...

Lots of page reloads as it's a mixture of HTML and Flash, so we're not
getting the 'it happens instantly' feel which I expected. This is probably
because I went via a Flash site which had it in it's portfolio, so may not
apply to normal visitors.

Different looking scrollbars added in dHTML and on the left hand side
(maybe this is standard on Swedish machines). Doesn't obey my arrow keys.

Overall - Not too bad, but with a few specific issues which need
addressing.

Actually, my reference "good use of Flash which really accomplishes its
task" is http://www.skyscraper.org/timeformations/transparent.html,
although I wish it had been physically bigger to be able to see all the
detail.

Cheers
Martin

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