Interface Usability
by Merien Q. Kunst

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Skip Intro: All the Way

Animated Flash introductions: if you really want one, start it with a SKIP button. In general, don’t make intros. They can be interesting for some entertainment sites, or designer agencies, but it’s not right to assume that:

Intelligent, clear, user-friendly employment of Flash on your Website is a much better reference than an indulgent intro that takes too long to load. Furthermore, if that visitor decides to return to your site, it’s not very useful to force them through that intro again.

The only fully justified intro is a light one that entertains the visitor while the main Web site loads. But visitors with fast connections should still be able to skip it - all of it. I could take the next ten pages to tell you the long long story about how the Flash Intro phenomenon started, but it’s not very useful, either. But if I were to tell that story, at least you’d have the mechanism - by turning the page - to move on to the real content. The best advice on this subject is to consider what, if any, added value an intro animation will give to your site.

Finally, here’s one option that’s not really used often enough. If you really feel driven to create animations that delight and amaze, why not create a separate area of your site for Flash experiments? In such an area, there is no reason to hold back because in that context, your animation IS the content, rather than an impediment to content.

It doesn’t seem likely that Flash will ever be well enough integrated into the browsers to eliminate this problem: using the browser navigation buttons is disastrous! When someone’s found their way to the information they needed from your Flash site, and then decides to hit the Back button to return to the previous segment, they’ll usually end up somewhere unexpected.

A similar annoying result occurs when a visitor attempts to bookmark a particular moment in your Flash movie - the bookmark will only return the visitor back to the start of your Flash movie.

Although a self-made Back button can be included in your Flash movie, visitors aren’t likely to get used to such features very quickly. Your regular visitors may get the hang of it, seeing two buttons with the same label (that is, the browser’s Back button, plus your own Back button) may confuse first timers.

To facilitate bookmarking of specific parts of the Flash content drastic measures would be required: split up your movie into several segments, and distribute them over web pages that can be individually bookmarked. Usually this effort is worth the extra work, since it has additional advantages. Of course, it saves visitors the drag of navigating back to the point of interest every time they visit the site. But it also helps improve the speed of your Website. Plus, if you update just one of the movies, you’ll be working on a less complex .FLA. And, finally, when the update is completed, caching can still be used to retrieve the other pages. Only the changed page will have to be reloaded from the server.

The method indicated above, which facilitates the bookmarking of your Flash pages, can also solve the analysis problem of fully Flashed sites. Since a single movie is grabbed from the web server, it’s virtually impossible to tell what people are doing inside your site. What segments attract most visitors, what are the common exit points, and which pages are never viewed? Website statistics are a valuable developer tool for Website improvements and visitor analysis. Complex schemes can solve this problem, involving database logging and/or posting to forms from within your Flash movies, which I will not discuss. The easiest, if somewhat crude, way to generate proper statistics is by splitting up your movie into segments that reflect the structure of your site. This enables you to use classic tools to view the statistics of your site, since every segment sits in it’s own HTML page. Furthermore, this solution, when coupled with Metatags, can also ensure that your Flash site is properly represented among the search engines.