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Any real world observations on the use of flash to sell products? What are some of the obvious ways to help sell a product with flash?
Thanks.
I view it as a personal failure that Flash collected the bronze medal for annoyance. It's been three years since I launched a major effort to remedy Flash problems and published the guidelines for using Flash appropriately. When I spoke at the main Flash developer conference, almost everybody agreed that past excesses should be abandoned and that Flash's future was in providing useful user interfaces.
Despite such good intentions, most of the Flash that Web users encounter each day is bad Flash with no purpose beyond annoying people.
Jakob Nielsen, Top Ten Web Design Mistakes of 2005, October 3, 2005
(If you don't know Nielsen's site, google for the phrase or sticky me for the URL)
Simple answer is that like any powerful tool flash has a huge potential to be misused or used badly. Blame the bad designs created with it not the product.
We regularly produce full flash based sites, on average these get as many or more hits as the non-flash ones but have more wow factor and clients (in our market) generally prefer them.
Sorry but the slow load argument is a very old and outdated one and really stems back to badly designed and optimised flash files before the advent of actionscript as a serious programming language.
As for Jacob Nielsen, well his comments increase his book sales, plus I think recently he changed his mind about flash, more book sales then I guess....
Old adage, "bad workmen blame their tools."
and clients (in our market) generally prefer them
Yes, I hear this argument often. But do your client's site's visitors prefer them too?
Usability, coupled with a suitable presentation style for the particular job can be achieved in flash or XHTML, its just a case of using the right tool for the right job.
The "load" time I was referring to was the 120kb .swf file that I am testing out. Does that not add to the "load" factor of a page? I know that those with dsl and cable will not have a problem, but I tried it with a 56k modem and there is additional delay to loading the page.
What are people's thoughts on maximum page size for the html, images, etc.? Is that a problem, or is the 56k modem problem going away? What percentage of people have high speed connections? I am doing mostly consumer sales directly for electronic items.
I hate it when online stores use Flash for product navigation and I can't do my multiple-tab thing. I leave those sites and go elsewhere fast. Once you get used to multiple tabs, navigating one page at a time is unacceptable.
For that reason and that reason alone, I avoid using Flash for any navigation whatsoever.
A bit of Flash to show different views of the product, or demonstrate its use, or that kind of thing, can definitely be helpful, though.
120k for a short advert is reasonably large, although the test would really be what would a similar static graphic run out at?
Maybe you should consider calling any images into the flash file when needed and holding them externally, that will certainly bring down the file size, alternatively import them as .png flash crunches these amazingly well without loosing quality and file sizes are better than using .jpg's in my experience.
My thoughts on Flash and usability, as a user: I'm a Mozilla/Firefox user, and I habitually (nearly always) open links in a new tab. Particularly when I'm shopping online -- I open a bunch of tabs on similar products and browse through them to decide which one(s) I'm interested in. Then, the ones I'm interested in, I open the "more info" page in a new tab, the specs page in a new tab, the "more photos" in new tab, the "shipping costs" in a new tab, etc., etc.I hate it when online stores use Flash for product navigation and I can't do my multiple-tab thing. I leave those sites and go elsewhere fast. Once you get used to multiple tabs, navigating one page at a time is unacceptable.
For that reason and that reason alone, I avoid using Flash for any navigation whatsoever.
A bit of Flash to show different views of the product, or demonstrate its use, or that kind of thing, can definitely be helpful, though.
EXACTLY!
Amy
Search Engines are blind to Flash code, they can't read it, making Flash-based sites nearly impossible to optimize.
yes but a properly built flash site should hold the text and images outside and call them via loadvars() therefore a simple link to the text file or a php include into a hidden div is all thats require to make the site transparant to search engines... not exactly rocket science just a bit of thinking outside the box!
If flash is so good, then why do the best / highest ranking Web sites (google,yahoo,msn,amazon,ebay, et al) not use it?
As for myself, I do admire the righteous flash site and will use it if it suits me, but no more or less than an html-based site... Considering it takes 10 times the work to create in flash what one can create in html, it's just not worth it to me.
If flash is so good, then why do the best / highest ranking Web sites (google,yahoo,msn,amazon,ebay, et al) not use it?
Simple thats not what flash is for, large content heavy sites are better done in HTML (as I suspect you already know), and I don' think macromedia would ever set flash up as an ideal solution forr those types of sites.
We charge moe for flash based work, because it takes longer, but if the client wants a presentational brochure type site then flash is the best solution IMO to create them something memorable.
Lke everyting its using the right tool for the right job.
Considering it takes 10 times the work to create in flash what one can create in html
Building a tableless xthml website that works cross browser, future browser, and past browser, imo, is much more time consuming and takes much longer to accomplish than flash. I can write a flash program and in almost no time test it across all versions of flash that I feel the need to make it compatible with. When a new version of flash player appears, I test once and am done.
Even though I only use xthml anymore, I know for a fact that I could accomplish things faster and easier using flash.
If flash is so good, then why do the best / highest ranking Web sites (google,yahoo,msn,amazon,ebay, et al) not use it?
[video.google.com...]
[join.msn.com...]
[music.yahoo.com...] (flash advertisement)
They may not use flash on their homepages yet but it is used.
and incoming links cannot ( afaik ) be made to the interior of .swf files ..
[macromedia.com...]
The "load" time I was referring to was the 120kb .swf file that I am testing out.
Gasp, 120kb is way to much. Flash is powerful and I guarantee that if learn more about it you could turn that 120k file into a 20k file that looks even better. Using device fonts, converting raster images to vectors (and cleaning them up), and reusing symbols are just a few ways to crunch that file.
Is there an increase in sales per visit?
That's an extremely interesting question. I would imagine in the right market space, with the right design, yes.
But I would also imagine such appropriate spaces are quite few and far between. And the risk of doing Flash badly is well highlighted in the posts above.
TJ
