Home » Technology » Web Editing » How To Use Flash To Ruin The User Experience

How To Use Flash To Ruin The User Experience

© Christopher Cummings

For those of you not "in the know," Flash is an animation program offered by Macromedia. With the Flash plugin installed in your browser, you can access exciting interactive websites, games and presentations.

According to Macromedia, Flash is pretty popular, too: 270+ million Flash users worldwide as of September 11, 2000.

Regardless of the actual statistics (not that we doubt you, Macromedia!), Flash can be a true marvel to behold — in the right hands.

And that's the key right there, isn't it?

Many sites offer a "Flash Experience." Unfortunately, many of these sites don't know what the hell they're doing.

Take icebox.com, for example. I went there yesterday to take a gander at the site because an author I like announced that he had sold icebox a 13-part animated serial.

So I fired up a new browser window and typed in www.icebox.com.

This is the message I received from my friends at icebox.com:

It appears that you don't have the latest version of Flash.

You need the Macromedia Flash 4 plug-in.
When you have finished installing Flash 4, click here to get into Icebox.

View a screen grab of the offending screen.

It was nice of them to direct me to the Flash download page. However — why should I bother enduring the download and install? Really, what's in it for me? The "You don't have Flash" page doesn't offer a single, compelling reason to download and install Flash, let alone return to icebox.com.

Reread that offending screen.

• There are no product descriptions ("Exciting animated series ...")
• There are no indications of who's involved ("IceBox: Exclusive provider of content for ...")
• There's not even a simple apology ("Sorry, you need Flash to view ...")

For Barry Allen's sake, icebox.com doesn't even offer a tag line on that redirect page!

Without any sense of who or what icebox.com is, the non-Flash user is left alone to conjure up the identity. Here's what I came up with:

• Icebox.com — "Keeping Users In the Dark Since 1999!"
• Icebox.com — "Don't Understand Our Value Proposition? Don't Worry, Neither Do We!"
• Icebox.com — "Mysterious. And Loving It!"

Of course, most Web users won't waste time creating funny little tag lines for pretentious websites. Instead, they'll simply move onto the next site on their list — and that's the true danger for websites like icebox.com.

Typical Web users don't have time to waste on your site (no offense). Either you're ready to rock when the user arrives, or the user is out of there.

The copyright of the article How To Use Flash To Ruin The User Experience in Web Editing is owned by . Permission to republish How To Use Flash To Ruin The User Experience in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.