Flash and Bad Design

Flash is a major annoyance on the web: some people wonder why I don't like it. I have my reasons. They're similar to the ones that caused me to disable javascript in my browser from 1998 to 2002: annoyances.

It seems like designers who make flash-based sites, or sites incorporating much flash content go out of their way to annoy the user.

Jakob Nielson thinks this way as well:

About 99% of the time, the presence of Flash on a website constitutes a usability disease. Although there are rare occurrences of good Flash design (it even adds value on occasion), the use of Flash typically lowers usability. In most cases, we would be better off if these multimedia objects were removed.

I chuckled over the phrase 'Usability Disease' for a while, then moved on.

In the summary for that linked article, Nielson puts it blandly: Flash encourages bad design. That's an understatement. I've seen the following UI atrocities recently:

• A site with a scrolling text block crammed into three lines. The text was tiny and low-contrast against the shimmering background. Clicking the 'down' scroll arrow moved the text down a line. There was a small essay's worth of text in the box. Think I want to read that?
• A navigation menu where clicking on a link to a page made the user wait for five seconds while graphical elements zoomed all around the page. It smacked of 'look how much time I can waste doing pointless things': is it really necessary to waste time in addition to the already-slow loading delay of the web?
• A text box (not related to #1 on this list) with text rolling beyond the bottom. I thought: 'where's the scrollbar?'. Turns out the scrollbar zoomed in when you moused over these tiny dots at the top and bottom right-hand side of the box. Things that look huge in design-o-vision are tiny on a high-resolution monitor

Let's not forget the other drawbacks of flash:

• banner ads with sound (thank you, adblock!)
• Lagging delay of up to 15 seconds at random when right-clicking on a flash object in firefox (MacromediaAdobe's firefox plugin is a piece of crap)
• Unbookmarkable content (if I really need to spend 10 minutes searching for it, I'm not coming back)
• slow loading time (did I really need to download that 900kb .swf in order to display 10k worth of text?)
• Non-standard user interface controls (do we really need 337 different types of scrollbars?)
• The need to download a plugin at all (why? Unless you're displaying video, why do I need to download and install a plugin and disrupt my workflow now now now

Nielson makes a number of other points. He's always been critical of flash. I suggest any flash fanatics read over his stuff before replying with criticism here.