10 Good Reasons to think twice before using Flash animations in your web site

Flash animations can be great, but in this newsletter I'm explaining why poorly used Flash can turn good web sites bad.

Note: Since this article was written Jakob Nielsen has also written a similar article on this subject - "Flash: 99% bad". You can find more of Jakob's excellent articles at his Alertbox web site. - John Arnold (3/11/2000)

Unnecessary Animation

1. Using Flash to develop a web site usually involves a huge amount of gratuitous animation. Remember that your customer has come to your web site to get at your precious information, or to buy your products. Unless you are advertising your graphic design skills, chances are the user has not come to be entertained with animations.

2. Unlike animated gifs, Flash animations cannot be stopped by pressing the stop button on the browser. Thus users may end up being so distracted by the movement of your animation that they cannot read your content / buy your product. End result, the user leaves dissatisfied.

Poor Usability

3. The Back button on the browser toolbar is not available in Flash animations, meaning that the end user loses control over their environment. "BACK is the second-most used navigation feature in Web browsers (after the simple 'click on a link to follow it' action). Thus, breaking the BACK button is no less than a usability catastrophe. " - Jacob Nielsen (http://www.useit.com/alertbox/9612.html)

4. The 'Find (on this page)' function is disabled.

5. Text cannot be copied and pasted from within a Flash page.

6. Printing Flash pages doesn't work.

7. The address bar is disabled within a Flash animation. Individual page titles and page names are lost and the ability to move up one folder within a directory structure is lost.

8. Flash eliminates users' html 'visited' and 'unvisited' colours, the single most important navigational clue on the web.

Splash Pages

9. Putting an animated 'barrier to entry' to a site is especially annoying if your visitors are to return to your site often. If you want them to keep coming back, give splash pages a miss.

10. The first viewing of a Flash animation can be off-putting, especially if the user had to download a plugin in order to view the site. The second viewing of a flash animation, however, especially one of 50k or over, could well be irritating enough that a user never visits your web site again.

On the other hand...

Flash can be a very useful way of demonstrating something that is difficult to describe using words alone. For example, a good use of Flash in a web site would be for a PC manufacturer to assist their users by animating the steps involved in opening the PC case and slotting in more RAM.

Conclusion

Use Flash with a purpose in mind, perhaps as a visual aid. Put a link to it from the correct place in your web site - not necessarily the front page - and allow people to view your animation, but do not force them to view it.

Copyright © 2000 Ruth Arnold (ruth@spacehoppa.com)