RE: FLASH: I'm looking for good Flash examples

[Len Harrison]

Robert Warnke wrote:


> I think a lot of designers...don't know the

> difference between ...interactivity and ... animation. An interactivity

> mustn't have a time delay or an animation. I take a choice and

> then I [jump] immediately.

>

> I hate time delay in an intro of a page... I

> ...like... fast... content...It is enough to wait for download time.

> I think Flash is more a toy for designers. The bad style.. will [annoy a

lot of] surfers.

> [Page loading] can stopped with the [Browser's] stop button...Good

HTML...work[s] without images...In Flash the browser buttons don't work. I

have no control [over] my

> browser.I can't accept this "user interface".

...<previous post>...

I 'll teach Flash next week


>

> Thank you

>

> Robert Warnke

>

Hi Robert,


You say you are going to teach a class on Flash. Why? Because you think you

can and someone pay will you to do it or because you got drafted by your

department to do so? I'm not knocking that, we all have to eat. But if you

want to provide value to your students and your employer, you need to

understand the rationale for Flash. From what you've written, you don't see

that. You define interactivity as pressing a button and getting someplace

instantly. If I understand you correctly, you want the "information" to pop

up on the screen without any intervening animation. You don't want to see it

slide into place, come in from a distance, or appear gradually through an

alpha fade. You seem to see Flash as primarily a UI tool or else you simply

don't like the UI's developed by Flash designers.


>From your perspective Flash is ridiculous though you haven't said that.

Plain HTML is more effective for interaction as you define it. But that

isn't the point of Flash. Flash *is* an animation tool. Animation has value

for many people. Look at the perennial popularity of cartoons. Look at the

transition effects incorporated into even essentially static presentation

tools like Powerpoint. Look at the effort that went into the development of

animated gifs and dhtml. Flash provides all this within a scriptable

interactive framework. That's its value, not the ability to jump from one

piece of static information to another.


People are fascinated by things which move on a screen. I don't know why.

Maybe it's biological. Static images are scenary. Things that move are

potentially threat or food.


I demoed a relatively simple Flash animation showing a product overview and

a piece of a tutorial to 50 staid IT professionals last Tuesday at the end

of an day-long product preview. I was the only presenter all day whose

presentation was applauded. The next day I had VPs beating a path to my

cubie saying we had to have more of this stuff. It was exactly what we

needed to make our products come alive for our customers. I know very well

what I would have gotten from demonstrating a set of static html pages

instead, even though they would have conveyed much more hard information

about the products and their use and could be built in a tenth the time. Do

that, though, and I would have gotten yawns from my audience and more likely

a pink slip than a vp visitation.


If you are going to teach Flash, you need to feel or at least understand its

appeal. Your point about being able to navigate out of it to a plain html

page is well taken, though, assuming the designer has an alternative page

available. Such an option is ideally positioned during a loading loop and

can be done within Flash itself.


In my opinion, since Flash is inherently scalable and animation immersive by

nature, it's usually best to make Flash pages all flash with no html and set

the Flash window to 100%x100% unless there are overriding reasons for doing

otherwise (use of bitmaps that don't scale or the need to incorporate form

elements such as textboxes that aren't supported by Flash). One of my

favorite tricks in demoing Flash to someone unfamiliar with it, is to expand

and contract the browser window while the movie plays. That never fails to

elicit a "Wow!".


Likewise I'm in favor of doing the plugin detection behind the scenes and

then using Javascript to switch document.location if they don't have it (the

meta tag alternative seems to be less reliable). That way users who do have

the plug-in get "Flashed" on the fly and don't have the preliminary setup of

"you are about to enter a Flash site". Hey! It just appears and it's in your

face. If I were teaching Flash I'd make all these points in connection with

alternative page strategies and encourage my students to build their jump

links into their opening Flash screens which should load no more than 15-30K

in the first set of frames.


Optimization techniques coupled with the use of the .swf report file can

speed up load times significantly. I reduced the initial load of a 200K

flash from 64K to 7K in this way. Even minimal content involvement ensures

the whole thing is loaded before the user clicks down through the frames.

I've tested it on my home connection from my own jaded perspective,

practically trying to catch the load lag. It's about 15 seconds to startup

and the next level loads so fast you can't beat it. There are some built-in

animation delays below that so that no matter what you do, you never

experience a wait beyond that initial fifteen seconds at 33.6.


If you can design content so that the user is engaged upfront in something

that is low bandwidth, you avoid the sense of waiting. This can involve

reading text if you have something interesting and germane for them to read

or some simple interaction that is nevertheless amusing. There's a Director

game called something like Lenny in the Outback which relieves the monotony

of segment loadtimes by providing a simple game for the user to play. This

would be even more effective if the intermission activity were tied into the

mainline content. For example the minigame would pay you money which you'd

need to purchase items in the main game. I'm pretty sure you could make this

work within Flash itself. You could easily do so in the host's scripting

language.


For an informational/educational piece, you could present the information

needed to effectively complete the interactive pieces using some kind of

hunter/gatherer metaphor where the user has to find the information by

turning over rocks or looking down holes or whatever. Lots of dead-ends but

a few goodies. Starts off simple with repeated use of the same symbol, a

couple of winners, and a few bad news bits that might throw them back to the

start if you needed a lot of load time. Gets more complicated later as you

develop an iconic vocabulary and more info to gather. They have to get each

goodie before they can go on. You can stack the deck to provide statistical

failure levels that ensure the time you need. A few people will luck out and

get there early, but you give them a big ego-booster that cycles until the

appropriate frame is loaded. Something like "Congratulations! You are a

1%er! Did you know that only one person in a hundred does as well as you

did? You're either very lucky or you have great ESP!" You could make that

crawl up the screen really slowly and the person will hang onto it if you

break up the phrases properly. Meanwhile you're still loading in the

background.


Interactivity is NOT turning pages. The UI for an effective informational,

educational, or entertainment piece involves much more than efficient

navigation. The process of communication is enhanced dramatically through

immersive attention and this must be an element in the UI design strategy

for any such work that aspires to be more than boring. Flash provides an

tool to create immersive, interactive environments and dynamic metaphors

that can enliven and invigorate your content. IMHO complaining that your

back button doesn't work across Flash frames is like complaining that your

car doesn't have a crank to start it.


len harrison

instructional designer

lenhabtcorp [dot] com

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