On the 29th of November 2000 almost 8 years ago Jacob Nielsen infamously stated that 99% of Flash is bad. In his article he stated that "Flash on a website constitutes a usability disease" and summarised that Flash breaks design. How true is this of todays high standard of design? Firstly lets take a trip back to the year 2000. If Flash wasn't going to kill design, it was certainly going to be the 'Y2K bug'. Macromedia owned Flash and was primarily used for creating long ugly flash intros. Which was in fairness a usability nightmare even with a skip intro button. So yes the vast majority of Flash being used in websites did depict poor usability and bad design. We saw a huge increase in annoying loud Flash adverts, which were considered browsing hell by users and often resulted in the user leaving the page to escape them. However I still believe even back in 2000 flash had many benefits in web design and that nowhere near the large amount of 99% being considered bad. By nowadays standards flash has grown and grown. Being implemented in more websites than ever before. With the release of Actionscript 2.0 and now Actionscript 3.0, the quality of design and usability in Flash websites have reached a new level and possibly hold the key for the future of web design. Not only by adhering to the basic set guidelines of user friendly web design but also by pushing new user interfaces for example http://www.jlern.com. However, like anything new and experimental people will discard anything away from the norm and at the end of the day thats what it comes down to. Jakob Nielsen did produce a excellent and valid point at the time, but no longer relates to todays high standard of Flash Animation in web design. With Google announcing it is now in works with Adobe to make text accessible by search engines in flash sites. Allowing a Flash website to be properly optimised for search engines. The inability to do this in my eyes is the major drawback with using Flash in web design. The future of Flash in web design is brighter than ever before and I can confidently say that only 29% of Flash is bad.
Not only the search engines, but too many Flash designers don't use the Accessibility button in Flash. This can make text-equivilants of Flash (which sometimes can fully replace the content of the Flash file and frankly sometimes cannot) available to both teh googlies and those without Flash or those without sight or hearing. Flash designers also don't think about keyboarders-- those who do not or cannot use a mouse. Getting into and out of a Flash movie on a page is a nightmare, though it doesn't have to be. And then there's the big white blocks of nothing sitting there telling you that you MUST absolutely run out and get the Latest Flash Player or else the world will end! instead of just giving you the content. So long as Flash is proprietary, I don't want it to end up that everyone MUST have Flash to use teh Interwebz, which is a possibility if everyone decides HTML is old-school and build everything in Flash. Then, we will all have these little Actionscript programmes running on our computers doing Lord Knows What since we can't look at or modify the code and see what they're sticking in there. Plus, I f*cking hate Flash, prolly because I don't have a tablet and while drawing with a mouse in GIMP is easy, drawing in Flash with a mouse makes everything look like a 6-year-old with Fragile-X drew it.
I don't like flash and I learned it for animation class. Great for animating horrible for users. The only thing I feel users will ever enjoy flash for is entertainment. So games, band sites, or random fun tool sites like a profile generator or something. The future of flash with professional website is very limited. My buddy designed a flash portfolio for a client. The client visited the website and was like wow I have to wait this long for my page to load? I also have to wait that long for my gallery? Not to mention many of his clients are web savvy and probably wouldn't stay 10-25 seconds just to see some pictures they could ask for in real life or google. He had a p4 with 2 gbs of memory and 128mb video card. It should've run pretty smooth in my opinion but it still took forever. My buddy designed a second site with Ajax and the client was super satisfied. It was faster. It was better and his clients were very pleased.
I remember the biggest push for flash was "cooler" menu navigation and the whatnot, which can now be achieved with CSS. The majority of my clients prefer it, mostly because of loading times, even with faster connections Flash can still be slow and its not indexable or friendly cross-browser. I'll stick with JSP / CSS to do the majority of the work. Or just good ole html. Besides, if you're original enough, you can accomplish some sweet stuff without incorporating the problems with Flash.
Flash's filesize are too big, and because of my Internet cap, I prefer not to download files over 1MB, so I browse with Flash turned off....
If you can replace flash with anything like javascript or css for photo gallerys etc it goes without saying that it should be used, however for more creative uses flash is unrivaled. I agree flash is awful for people with sight or movement problems and the loading times can be huge if the file is not properly created. However, it is still beneficial for web sites and if you can use it properly you should try and incorporate in suitable situations.
I'd disagree, simply because of how the luxury companies have pretty much jumped on the Flash bandwagon and it seems they will stay there. All the big names in clothing, cars, wines, jewelry... if you're lucky, they were smart enough to make an HTML version-- but usually this isn't so, making me hate it and never visiting their sites. However, that doctor or lawyer sitting in his leather Chesterfield sipping sherry in his private study is quite likely to be rich, have a fast internet connection, and the latest Flash player. *edit I've noticed a few companies have gone back to /HTML sites, where earlier I remember they were in Flash) Look at how these sites are made in Flash (and I'm pretty sure the design companies who've made them earned boku bucks with these-- I can imagine Olilly.nl being a 40k euro site, easily): http://www.oilily.nl/ (changes whole design every "season" it seems...) http://www.truereligionbrandjeans.com/ (hybrid site, rather nice to look at and interesting use of ordinary images too) http://www.nike.com/g1/eu/index.jhtml?lang=1,1 (makes use of different pre-loader films to entertain the user while s/he waits for the real site... this is after navigating through their language and country portal, like coke.com does.) http://www.exclusiveresorts.com/ (actually starts you out, if JS is disabled, some text! And an explanation of what's going on, and then a link to the HTML site. It's at least usable, though it does slow the visitor down, but I like this better than sniffing.)
I know but I've also heard some companies dropped off due to increase in views but decrease in sales. I only heard I have no care to really research that part.
Excepting usages such as Youtube's and sIFR, I'd be surprised if even 1% of Flash oriented sites are worth a steaming dog's t*rd. As a low quality multimedia content client, Flash is excellent. I love the way Flash is used as a vehicle to deliver me skateboarding dogs As a major design element, it is a waste of the visitors' time. An example of a good usage that I've seen was an on-line maintenance manual. Flash animations were used to illustrate parts removal and replacement sequences. An animated gif image could have done the same. Even in this case, the alternative content capabilities of the object element were not properly used and accessibility issues were ignored. cheers, gary
I've rebuilt my site using Adobe Flex (my site is sort of an experiment) and you only have to download around 300kb for the whole app + all the images on each page so size is not really an issue. Yes Flex is not perfect and yes its still not friendly with SEO yet and i hope it will be someday. Its just if you overuse something it will be cubersum and annoying
My "experts" recommended flash for the video portion of a watercolor teaching site using primarily how to do it videos. The argument was. almost all Internet users have flash, so they push the button and the video plays. Also you can stream the video so it starts up immediately. Doesn't that sound great? Only streaming servers are big bucks for small bandwidth, and I can make cleaner, smaller wmv files. They also start fast. Still, the experts say flash is the way to go. My new site is going to be class all the way. It is not launched, ( It already has good PR and serps, hee hee ), but it is looking good. Still, the flash feels like I have eaten something that almost tastes good and dos not smell too bad.
A Flex application shouldn't have to be SE friendly, it should be a download/portion of your site and not the whole site itself.
The key issue for me, which has been alluded to in other posts, is that while Flash can produce some wonderful stuff, too often it is used inappropriately and/or at the expense of usability. There are, without a shadow of a doubt, some applications that are a perfect fit for Flash and would be very difficult to present in any other way, but I've seen simply far too many sites where the 'designers' are too heavily involved in the graphics and appearance side of the project and have little, if any, understanding of their client audience and needs. In my opinion, it cannot be stressed heavily or often enough that websites for businesses are about the customer, not the site. Very few people looking to book a hotel are going to make their choice based on that hotel's use of Flash on their site. They may well have that choice made for them if they can't work out how to use the whizz bang menu system or die of old age waiting for it to load. Project Mobius claims his Flex site is 'only' 300kB to download. ONLY?? 300k is enormous for a web page, even with today's spread of broadband. Yes, it might be fine for a site where the user expects a complex interface (YouTube, for example) but I simply cannot see a reason why a business selling a product would want to run the risk. This isn't really just an opinion, it's backed by fact. I recently advised a client that their Flash menu was too complex and was a contributing factor to their high bounce rate. They replaced it with HTML/CSS and their bounce rate dropped by 10% overnight, an extra 200 potential customers a day who were now spending time on the site rather than getting frustrated and angry, unable to easily navigate what should have been a simple site. The other points made in the thread are worth repeating. If I go to a site to try and buy a DVD player and it insists I download the latest version of Flash before I can see anything, I won't bother, I'll just go straight back to Google. What about mobiles? What about partially sighted users or those who are simply unfamiliar with the web? The web has changed a great deal since 2000, but if anything I think more companies are beginning to realise that the web should be a tool, not just a pretty picture, and that they need to think about their users, not just how great it looks. Jon
And there it is, in a nutshell. Personally, I see Flash as best for this sort of thing. Very very beautiful.
I don't support flash sites.they are not seo friendly and take much time to load in low bandwidth areas. So a professional site should be away from much flash. But small flash banners make the site looking good.
Back to the initial thread, Flash doesn't have to be used just for one purpose. The way in which you are referring to web design is that you can have one or the other, meaning HTML or FLASH. Flash can be implemented along side HTML and has done for years, meaning sites can be SE friendly and look good. Its all about implementation. Stomme poes Plus, I f*cking hate Flash, prolly because I don't have a tablet and while drawing with a mouse in GIMP is easy, drawing in Flash with a mouse makes everything look like a 6-year-old with Fragile-X drew it. USE ILLUSTRATOR
Flash isn't meant to be used for illustrations, its meant for animation... like creare SEO said use Illustrator.
Uh, unless you've imported images, you need to DRAW what is ANIMATED. I try to DRAW with the mouse, so I can ANIMATE it. That's why Flash has DRAWING tools-- it started out actually as a vector drawing program, before the framing was added. Making one photograph fade into another is not the problem-- anyone and his grandma can do that, and it's NOT animation. It's fading. Use jpgs and Javascript instead and it looks the same (and likely smaller bandwidth use, not sure). Plus, why would I spend 317 euros for something that ties me into a proprietary filetype and doesn't do any better than Inkscape??