[Sigia-l] Facets, Flash, and Fun

[David Heller]

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.

Cannon to me is a no brainer to do in simple DHTML so the flash piece and
the demo is just a waste of my time.

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. C|Net used to have back in the
early days of Java coolness the same type of tool, but instead of showing
pictures of items, they would pot them out on a graph where on mouseover I
got more information. Then I was able to limit the # of items on the plotter
by using sliders (but they were bi-directional, not just decreasing a max,
but also increasing a min).

Considering this was done in about '97, I'm really unimpressed that a
company doing this today can't do any better than that. Flash again isn't
adding enough richness.

If you read the whitepapers on the Flash site one of things that flash can
do really well is not just make query systems better like this does, but
also combine form & list on the same screen to reduce navigation. In this
case I would expect a product summary in some way available on the same page
as the query builder. Broadmoore is a better example of this, as is the Pet
Store example on the macromedia site. This separation is a standard HTML
requirement (though not a necessary one), but is something that is so easy
to avoid in Flash enabled apps that it is almost inexcuseable not to do it.

-- dave

David Heller
Sr. User Interface Designer
Documentum: The Leader in Enterprise Content Management
925.600.5636
 
david.heller at documentum.com
http://www.documentum.com/
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--"If it isn't useful, it will never be usable."