In the past year or so I have wrote several articles, and even a book on Flash usability. One of the things that I find very interesting is the lack of interest designers have in making Flash (and even websites for that matter) usable. I can understand when designers abandon usability for personal sites and even art related sites. These are the areas where designers can go nuts, and their target audience doesn’t mind hunting for navigation.
I am still amazed how-ever that many national level Flash sites are still terribly hard to use, and fail basic usability guidelines. (For information on basic usability guidelines see
Flazoom,
Useit.com and
Flash 99% Good a site I created a while back) I think one of the problems is interactive media online is still in its infancy. Many creatives at both large agencies and small boutiques basically have free reign to do anything they deem is “cool” without any consideration of what the target audience might need or expect.
The culture of interactive designers also serves to discourage usability in sites. All to often I will see sites that win awards like
fwa one award,
bomb shock, and even Macromedia’s Shocked Site of the Day that are hard as hell to use. Every time a site that is extremely hard to use wins one of these awards it only serves to encourage bad design. Many young designers and students see that to gain recognition in their field, you must do the following:
1. Design something really, really, cool
2. The audience?? Who is that… it looks cool on my computer and the clients computer and that is all that matters!
It’s really hard to turn a designer on to usability just on principle alone. We need to encourage good design and usability in the same space, and show examples. And I’m afraid Macromedia, nor anyone else has really done a fantastic job of that. When usability Guru’s like Jakob Nielsen don’t put graphics on their site, it’s hard to sell usability to designers because it’s like speaking greek to them. Jakob has some
amazing things for us to learn, but most designers can’t see past his buck-ugly site. (which is too bad)
List of easy to use sites that are well designed: Learn by example.
Phantom Research Foundation This site has some really nice use of Flash navigation. The navigation is underlined so people know what is a link and what isn't. Very smart! Also the tree menu system is very easy to use, and let's users know where they are in the site. They also use vector text for alot of the navigaiton, making the download a snap!.
http://www.phantomresearchfoundation.com/
Flash 99% GoodI created this site for my book Flash 99% good a guide to Macromedia Flash Usability. The site tries to incorporate good usability such as enabeling the backbutton in Flash, and providing people the ability to print the Flash, and bookmark pages from within Flash. The source code for the whole site is free to download for you to scoop the code and find out how its done.
http://www.flash99good.com/
Macromedia.comMacromedia's site is really easy to use. They combine Flash and HTML in a way that enhances the experience.
http://www.macromedia.com/
Robert Penner's Back Button CodeRobert is a very talented Flash programmer. He has posted alot of free actionscript code on his site. This back button code is well designed and adds much in the way of usability to your site. I used alot of this code in my Flash99good.com site.
http://www.robertpenner.com/experiments/backbutton/backbutton.html
