For the last 2 years I have been running the Quintus Flash Index, which is a rather large collection of links to Flash sites. The reason I started it was simple enough: at the time, there weren’t any decent collections of Flash work on the Web. Yet I wanted to check sites out to see what Flash could do. So I went searching, exploring the world of Flash. As I explored, I decided to bookmark all the Flash sites that I came across. I ended up with a categorized, static list of about 150 links, which I then posted as a Web page, thinking that others might find it useful. Suddenly, I was getting 150 visitors a day, which is really not bad for a one-page site. As part of my internship, my supervisor suggested to implement the thing in htm, add some ding-dongs, and put it online like that. So I did - and it took off. Today, the QFI has links to over 2,200 Flash sites, and (amazingly) over 12,000 visitor comments.

The comments area was just something I added because I thought it would be a nice feature for people to show their approval or critique on a site, certainly very useful for the developers. At first I posted a lot of comments myself, trying to inspire people to follow my example. I focused mainly on overall impression and user friendliness, not really from an expert point of view, but rather like a regular user. But the more sites I reviewed, the more I found similar errors and mistakes that would confuse visitors. Over time, many other people at my site also helped out the site developers: by indicating what elements of the sites were unclear, confusing, or even irritating.

Consequently, I have had the opportunity to learn a lot about Internet usability and interface design. I found that a lot of the site critiques on the Quintus Flash Index could be traced back to basic usability design rules. Not a big surprise, but rather a very clear indication of the value of some of these rules.

Usability may sound mystifying to some people, and some best-selling books may champion the obscurity of this subject, but there’s really nothing too complex about it. Usability is the extent to which a system supports its users in completing their tasks efficiently, effectively, and satisfactorily - which may also include the experience of aesthetic pleasure. On the web, this leads to topics like navigation, speed, clarity and readability. The real trick about usability is the horrible task of letting it seep through in your design. Usability extremists call out for Websites with barely any graphics, using only default browser fonts (and default colors), and certainly no plug-ins.

But the fact is that Flash is one of the best design tools to effectively break most of those extreme rules of usability - and in a very short time. This tutorial attempts to steer both beginning and also experienced Flash designers towards a more responsible use of Flash. While this may sound a bit loaded, you should realize that, by now, quite a few sites have banned the use of Flash entirely -simply because they had the unfortunate experience of having Flash implemented on their behalf, but in the wrong way. Yet, when Flash is used the wrong way, it creates havoc. But the same might be said of htm. (The designers should have been blamed, rather than the tool!) So, to help Flash designers avoid making the same errors all over again, I’ve written out some pointers, highlighting many of the common errors I’ve encountered when reviewing Flash sites. I hope these hints will be useful to you.