Forum Moderators: open
Thanks!
You have to decide if your designers ego is worth hard cash to you.
SN
Macromedia-sponsored NPD survey of Flash penetration, march 2003 [macromedia.com]
Please note, that the notion of "2,000 participants comprising a representative Internet sample" is ... well, i can't think of a polite term, but it's not very likely. Plus: The sampling error that is referred to is also questionable.
<edit>"Plus:..." should read: with a dubious method like that they shouldn't even use the term sampling error. A study like that is a sampling error by itself.</edit>
Anyway, the two companies seem to think that penetration is almost 100%. Here's another study:
Security Space survey of technologies used on 1,547,591 web sites, july 2003 [securityspace.com]
There's also a one year old thread on the same subject here at WW:
To wrap up:
a) Macromedia suggests that almost 100% of users can see it
b) The number of sites that actually use it is below 10%
Now, with such a big difference in scale, wouldn't you think that there might be other good reasons for the apparent denial of use?
That is: "It's not necessarily a nice thing to use although most can see it". Just two hints: Most SE's don't read flash. Most internet users don't have DSL.
/claus
<added>i do find that there is more than a slight conflict between designing for monitors 600x800 and considering the user base to have very powerful pc's </added>
[macromedia.com...]
There are a few situations where I can see Flash being a plus - and one is for 3D views of high-end equipment.
Some caution from personal experience: limit your feature set to the lowest version you can. Looking at the MM chart in the linked page, you'll see about an 18 percent dropoff from Flash5 to Flash6. If possible for you, limiting to Flash 4 will bring you 96 to 97% of the world. But Flash6 you are only getting 72 or 73%.
And here's one caution. One of my clients made the [intelligent] decision to stay with Flash4 features in their movie. But their page builder did a copy/paste from another source on the HTML page -- and they let the codeset tag stay at version 6.
The stats clearly showed that of their visitors trying to view the Flash movie, 16% were not downloading it. The codeset tag meant that even though the COULD have viewed the movie, instead they were getting a "you must upgrade" message. Of course, most visitors will not take the time to upgrade on the spot.
There's lots more conversation on the forums here about Flash -- and much of it is negative. And in general, I'm very cautious about it. But in some cases, it can be a real plus.
Here is MacroMedia's own white paper
The term "white paper" has such an authoritative sound. It's not necessarily trustworthy in this case.
The link you provided is exactly the same sponsored survey that i referred to above: 2000 people representing the whole internet population - and no documentation as to where and how/if they found them or under which circumstances they were questioned.
To call the whole study a sampling error is a very hard statement, but really, i wouldn't trust it at all, based on the method description.
Nevertheless, there's actually a chance that the results are right - probability sometimes works in funny ways:
If the penetration really is very close to 100% - then a totally wrong method might still give the right result. They could (in theory) take a perfectly un-representative sample and still get the right results - by no other means than chance.
/claus
But you are completely right, menu items are usually "heavy" keywords, linking to other pagas as well, and this is important for SE.
I knew about the stats from Macromedia (saw it a year or two ago), but didn't want to look at them to make a decision.
Thanks again for your comments!
The term "white paper" has such an authoritative sound.
Maybe it's just because I've been hired to write so many, but to me "white paper" has a strong marketing sound these days -- "marketing with some data thrown in" would be my definition. So no argument from me about the study's validity. I had a more independent study in my bookmarks from 2002, but the domain has now expired. That's what happens when you get too independent, I guess.
But we don't need to rely only on those possibly biased studies. Look at how many companies are serving up Flash advertising these days. That's a statement on its own.
Plus, I just checked last week's stats, for the client I mentioned. They are running about 95% with Flash installed. And the missing 5% definitely contains some bots, I am sure of that.
But we were thinking about having some light menu items in flash
If the menu items are links, you might want to include the same links as text links in your html.
Also, I wouldn't export to version 6 if it can be avoided. With a little extra work, most things can be programmed for v4 or v5.
