[Sigia-l] Using Flash Rollovers to Uncover Information

[russ at bluechromedesign.com]

Katie,

> We are proposing using Flash rollovers to manage a large amount of
> information for a few topics on a page. Rather than have all information
>  visible at one time, the information for a particular topic would be
> revealed when the user rolls over the topic. See vw.com and vonage.com
> for  examples.

Mixed blessings in there.  It depends upon the type of site you're
creating, but I assume that since you're asking that you've got a solid
definition of that.  The truth is, those types of Flash
animation/rollovers are pretty simplistic to create and should have a
relatively low-cost to them.  Creating a single instance prototype could
be done in an hour or two, imho, so I'm unsure why it's not an option.

One of the issues that you encounter with Flash-based content such as this
is that anything linked will not be picked up by search engine spiders and
unless there's some other HTML linked reference on the page, the spiders
won't go deeper to hit the content.

I'm not entirely a fan of the option, but there are DHTML "popups" or
layers that could be used to support the additional content--it can be a
pain to meet all the browser requirements for this, however.  Just
something to consider.


> We're getting some push back - there is a fear that if it isn't all
> visible  all at all times, that users won't "find" the other
> information. Never mind  the cognitive overload of having it all
> visible...

I'd say that a point of discussion would be that a little bit of time and
effort/money upfront could prevent a re-work later, even if it's simply
lo-fi mock-ups and/or medium fidelty protyping.  Measure twice, cut once,
etc. etc.

I hope this helps.

Best,

Russ