[Sigia-l] Facets, Flash, and Fun

[Christopher Fahey [askrom]]

David Heller wrote:
> Both the Cannon & iokio to me are examples of poorly designed 
> experiences using Flash. Not b/c of the exact controls but rather b/c
the 
> experience isn't giving me enough richness to overcome the learning 
> curve in either case.

Do you really think the learning curve for the Canon interface has a
steeper learning curve than, say, Amazon's analogous camera comparison
interface?
 http://LessLink.com/amzncompare/

IMHO, there's hardly any learning curve at all for the Canon interface.
Drag, drop, instant feedback. Are we so gun-shy about introducing users
to "unconventional" interface elements that we forget how disgustingly
hard to use many "conventional" interfaces still are? 
 

> Cannon to me is a no brainer to do in simple DHTML

No DHTML is simple. Like I said, IMHO, I estimate that safe,
*cross-browser compatible* Javscript/DHTML/CSS would cost 2-3 times as
much (in person-hours) as it took to build this Flash version. Plus,
this Flash version is probably a much faster download (the data and SWF
are 130k total) than the gigantic pile of plaintext HTML that would be
in an HTML page download.

[I sometimes think that a lot of anti-Flash sentiment is driven by
developers' pride at all the DHTML and Javascript they worked so hard to
learn. Conversely, my pro-Flash sentiment is likely driven by my
ownActionscript knowledge - and my relative ignorance of DHTML, CSS,
Javascript. :-) Still, I tend to think that it's easier to learn (and
master) one language that works the same everywhere than to learn three
that each have several arcane dialects.]


> The iokio is an example of bad information visualizations. 
> What's the point of all those cameras there? They don't
> tell me anything about how they are grouped as there is 
> no surrounding context. 

Now that I think about it, the interface for the iokio oes have a lot of
flaws. Still, I don't think it's so bad in comparison to what it might
be like to do the same goal (narrow down a big list of cameras very
quickly and with a bit of fun) without Flash. Overall, though, it's not
a great example. I will cease to defend it! :)


> I would expect a product summary in some way 
> available on the same page as the query builder.

I agree with this, totally. I mean, why not?

-Cf

[christopher eli fahey]
art: http://www.graphpaper.com
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