Ethiopian Design

Not everyone will want to experience your Flash site, regardless of how great and cool it is. Always provide an alternate and easy way for users to get to your content. If users don’t have the plug-in, make sure they see something meaningful.

Make Sure Users Have Control
Give users buttons to skip introductions, animations, and so forth (e.g., “Skip Intro . . .”). The navigation must be available and accessible to the user. It is not fun to search for navigation, particularly when you are searching for information. Embed a link within the HTML of the page that allows users to skip through animations.

Ensure that this always visible to the users. Allow users to turn sound on and off and to control volume levels. Give users access to the Macromedia Flash contextual menu (this enables zooming, sound control, rewinding, and adjusting quality to fit local processing power). Provide navigation that allows users to tab through the choices for accessibility.

Give Users Feedback on the State of the File
Be sure to include a status bar to indicate how far along the movie is in its loading process. Keep the user informed of processes. Provide feedback about status (e.g., loading, clicks received, etc.) and total file size. When you tackle highly interactive interfaces that don’t follow a web paradigm, read up on traditional user interface design for applications. Most of the problems have been solved before and are very applicable to Flash development.

Put Movies on Separate Pages
Link to portions of different movies using URLs. This allows users to bookmark specific sections of the site.

User-Test Your Flash Sites
Be sure to perform proper user testing of your web site. Perhaps you’ll decide those straight HTML pages are better after all!

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