A Nostalgia Piece
Flash is Good for Web Designers…and Its Good for the Web.
I wrote this in 2001, during my heyday as a Flash developer, and thought I’d copy and paste it here for perpetuity.
Jakob Nielsen states that Flash is 99% bad for the web. He’s right. In its current state and at this current time, Flash is more novel than pragmatic. As designers, we’ve used it in very esoteric ways. Its followers have grown into a cult of designers who have squeezed every ounce of “flashiness” out of it, while the rest of society—and Nielsen—sit wondering what the hell happened.
But, wait, Mr. Nielsen. Flash is not a bad product. In fact, from a designer’s standpoint, its greatly freeing. It, at once, rids us of so many problems that we’ve had in coding HTML, DHTML, CSS, and JavaScript.
For one, it is browser independent. No longer do designers have to waste hours making stylesheets look at least less-than-ridiculous on Netscape. No longer do true HTML coders have to worry about interns reformatting their pages in some fancy-schmancy HTML editor, messing up what was once really beautiful code. No longer do web designers need to be both computer programmers and art directors. We can just concentrate at the heart of what Flash promotes—design.
So, what’s with all the fuss? The fuss is that the majority of Flash designers have designed for themselves first, designed for their clients second, and designed for end users last. The very things that make Flash so cool to its designers make it so unusable to the mass public.
This Flash design philosophy has only HTML to blame. That’s right. HTML. You see, for so long, designers have been constrained by <TD> and <TR> that the mere thought of being able to drag and drop elements onto a page, display content through space as well as time, and reuse existing objects led us astray. We daydreamed about what Flash could finally do for us.
Flash is the Prozac of web design. We’ve abused it…taken one too many pills and just went crazy with it. We didn’t stop to think what it meant to end users. We didn’t realize that people that weren’t us would be a little confused as to how to click through a site with only icons. We didn’t really consider that 97% of the public really couldn’t care less about site intros that we spent months molding and weaving.
Sites like eye4u.com and the Balthaser studios were once heralded for their innovative use of Flash. They concentrated on emotion, style, and experience rather than functionality and intention. Now that everybody’s copied them, Flash is getting a bad rap.
What I believe (hope) will be the next generation of Flash sites is not something more visually stunning. These vector graphic based sites will start to fit more within the mainstream. Visual overload will be replaced by visual simplicity. As designers, we will begin to put Flash’s unique features to better use. By better, I don’t mean by making Flash sites more “flashy,” but by making Flash sites more usable, functional, and first and foremost, useful.
For one thing, Flash’s strong audio capabilities will be put to better use. Sites will not just be visually functional, but we’ll add voice as an additional way of easing the user experience. Up to now, sound in Flash has been mainly relegated to emphasizing button hits and object movements, or as mood music.
Also, with the ability to connect Flash dynamically through object-oriented XML sockets, we will soon see the first mainstream e-commerce all-Flash sites. This will be exciting. For the first time, we will really see how Flash’s graphical capabilities can actually drive user experience. No more clunky form submissions through HTML. With Flash, forms will be better displayed, easier to understand, and more goal-specific than the now commonplace HTML form.
Sites will make more sense. There will be less pages and downloads for users to go through when everything can be streamed through Flash. Browsing products will be more personal, more dynamic, and more exciting, while the new XML applications will make Flash more functional and useful.
It was HTML’s fault for making us Flash designers so crazy. Flash became a refuge for designers tired of complaining browsers and complicated tables. Yet, now that we have realized our mistakes, we can start making Flash really work for designers and users.