On the 29th of November 2000 almost 8 years ago Jacob Nielsen infamously stated that 99% of Flash is bad. In his article he stated that "Flash on a website constitutes a usability disease" and summarized that Flash breaks design.
How true is this of today's high standard of design? Firstly lets take a trip back to the year 2000. If Flash wasn't going to kill design, it was certainly going to be the 'Y2K bug'. Macromedia owned Flash and was primarily used for creating long ugly flash intros. Which was in fairness a usability nightmare even with a skip intro button.
So yes the vast majority of Flash being used in websites did depict poor usability and bad design. We saw a huge increase in annoying loud Flash adverts, which were considered browsing hell by users and often resulted in the user leaving the page to escape them. However I still believe even back in 2000 flash had many benefits in web design and that nowhere near the large amount of 99% being considered bad.
By nowadays standards flash has grown and grown. Being implemented in more websites than ever before. With the release of Actionscript 2.0 and now Actionscript 3.0, the quality of design and usability in Flash websites have reached a new level and possibly hold the key for the future of web design. Not only by adhering to the basic set guidelines of user friendly web design but also by pushing new user interfaces for example jlern.com.
However, like anything new and experimental people will discard anything away from the norm and at the end of the day thats what it comes down to. Jakob Nielsen did produce a excellent and valid point at the time, but no longer relates to todays high standard of Flash Animation in web design. However, there are still many Flash related usability issues including the lack of consideration for users with hearing or sight problems.
With Google announcing it is now in works with Adobe to make text accessible by search engines in flash sites. Allowing a Flash website to be properly optimized for search engines. The inability to do this in my eyes is the major drawback with using Flash in web design. When incorporated properly in web design (like here), its future of Flash seems brighter than ever before and I can confidently say that only 29% of Flash is bad.
Published by Sam Logan Designer for Firebubble Web Design and Logo Design Company.
