Flash and Usability!
Jakob Nielsen in his Top Ten Web Design Mistakes of 2005 writes:
Flash is a programming environment and should be used to offer users additional power and features that are unavailable from a static page. Flash should not be used to jazz up a page. If your content is boring, rewrite text to make it more compelling and hire a professional photographer to shoot better photos. Don’t make your pages move. It doesn’t increase users’ attention, it drives them away; most people equate animated content with useless content.
If used correctly flash can be a great tool and a great addition to your site. However if designed badly (especially the fully flash sites) it can be a disaster to a company. Here designed badly means in the usability sense, it can look pretty but if the site is not usable then forget about your customers coming back to your site. Nobody wants to crack their head just to figure out how to navigate your site, or to stare at the “loading..” message. Users want to get the information fast, in a simple way.
Unfortunately some companies do not understand it, sometimes clients ask the designers or webdesign company to make their site different from others. Because they like to believe that they are different type of company, not like any other. And they would like to portray this image on their corporate site. However when you want to be different from others, you are risking losing some of your customers to your competitors. Because every new site that does not follow the web conventions will likely to confuse users, and confused users most probably will not use your site for long, soon or later you will loose them. Therefore having a creative flash site is not always cool, unless the designer knows what he is doing (has a good flash usability expertise).
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