Do Good Design

I like to check in on Flash websites from time to time to see if I need to start using Flash for my clients’ websites. Happily for me and them, Flash is still awkwardly slow and frivolous, so if you’re wondering whether you need a bells and whistles website like this one, the answer is “God, no”.

What’s Flash?

Not sure what Flash is?

Flash is the software most often used in film trailer websites and other websites aimed at The Youth. For years, its developer, Macromedia, has been trying to convince web designers it was the best tool for websites.

It’s best recognized by the ubiquitous “Page Loading, Please Wait” symbol, since that’s what Flash is best at: making you wait.

Then it delivers a graphic-heavy page that clunks through to other pages of largely useless information.

a bad user experience

Flash websites love to have a lot of movement and action, accompanied by a looping track of sound that gets annoying after 10 seconds.

What they often lack is a good “user experience”. By that I mean, you as the “user”, or visitor, are thwarted in getting the information you want.

I’m sure you’ve had this happen on many a website: you can’t find what you’re looking for, you go from page to page and feel like you’re running in circles. Or pages take an age to load while you sit there impatiently clicking the mouse, trying to make it go faster.

Too often, Flash websites rely on their cool images or things flying around to impress people. They forget to do the basics right, like serving up information your key audience wants as quickly and simply as possible.

but it can do fun extras

I’m all for pretty design and even the occasional fun extra like the “Choose Your Daemon” game on The Golden Compass website.

In this case, you take a personality quiz and at the end you are presented with the appropriate animal daemon.

As a fan of the books, I enjoyed this little aside, though again, the slider they used was more cumbersome and a bit annoying to use than a simple checkbox or radio button.

So go on over to The Golden Compass if you want to play a game or two: just expect to do a lot of waiting.