Week 8 - Flashy vs. Usability

The first thought while reading Jakob Neilsens Flash: 99% bad, was contemplating the last time I actually desired to sit through a Flash animation, when the website’s focus was not specifically oriented toward visual imagery. Unlike website photo galleries of abandoned buildings like Danvers State Insane Asylum and Hours of Darkness, I could not recall of a single website Flash introduction page when my first impulse was not to locate and click on with my mouse the (skip intro) link. Surprisingly, Mr. Neilsen did not mention about poorly designed Flash pages, where it is incredibly hard to click on the (skip intro) and navigation links, along with incompatibility with the Netscape web browser. In addition, Mr. Neilsen did not discuss digital divide problems back in year 2000, with old slower computers, many without current Flash software, along with slow dialup access to large size page downloads, which make accessing these flash-page harder to nearly impossible.

To summarize Mr. Neilsen’s fundamental message throughout the article, most Flash webpage designers seem to be prioritize (style over substance), in which more attention is paid to webpage appearance over providing greater access to information. In application, these practices continues previously mentioned (nasty usability issues), resulting in problems with webpage browsing navigation and tracking, visibility of text, accessibility to persons with disabilities, along with impeding the utility of translation and searching for words. In essence, Mr. Neilsen argues most Flash webpage designers seem to create web-pages which are not appropriately designed for the people interacting with websites, and designers focus on creating attractive animations and toolbars detract from the websites core purpose.

For this assignment I made several modifications to the original Blogger profile photo.

Using Photoshop CS2, I drew two rectangles with the rectangle tool on the lower left window, repeatedly applying the paint bucket tool with black swatch until the lights and reflections from outside the house were removed from the window. Then I increased the brightness by 20 on each space. I then reduced the size of the photo from the original enormous size to a 480 pixel width by a 352 pixel height, for the recommended width for posted images into a table.

With the oval tool in Fireworks MX 2004, I drew a gray colored moon with a 100% oil-slick texture, so it would appear close to what the moon’s actual surface looks like. This moon was saved as a png file, and then imported into Flash MX 2004. For the planet Mars, I drew a smaller planet with an orange-reddish color, and applied a 51% oil-slick texture. This planet was then saved as a png file and imported into Flash MX 2004. I also drew a star with the star-tool, and then saved it as a png file to be imported into Flash MX 2004. I did not import other stars I created from the original, and utilized the free-transform tool to stretch and rotate them.

I drew the rectangle with Flash MX 2004, then utilized the timeline to insert a keyframe at the 40th frame. The transform tool was applied to create a motion and a shape tween, rotating the rectangle 360 degrees counter clockwise with a motion ease of 70 to slow at the end. Similar motion and shape tween modifications were applied to the quote of Ralph Waldo Emerson, except the text rotated clockwise and had a motion ease of 50 to slow at the end. Font styles Verdana, Arial, Courier New, and Italicized Times New Roman was applied to a sequence of words in the quote, to shape tween the text. Text was inserted into rectangle toolbar buttons at the 40th frame, then the (Go to Web Page) behavior was applied, with hyper links to the stated pages.