UX considerations of using Flash

There has been a lot of discusion around the web surrounding the use of Flash on websites. The discusion was geared mainly about the availability of Flash on some platforms and it’s general slowness on others.

That is not my point today.

What I do want to talk about is the value of Flash to the most regular user - the one who can run it reasonably fast and has it installed on his computer.

I’ll start with the benefits. Less work for the developer in bringing rich capabilities to inferior browsers. If you still use Internet Explorer I think you probably wish Flash was used a lot more. Especially today when developers are getting these dangerous ideas about things like graceful degradation and “your experience is only as good as is your browser”. Also if the developer can spend less time optimizing and testing on every browser he will have more time to polish other aspects of the app. Next I’ll mention the obvious: there are things that cannot be done without a plugin - you might as well use flash for them (full screen video and progress with uploading being the most prominent examples at time of writing).

Now the negatives: although Flash is improving in this area, I argue that it has small and hard to spot usability issues. These can be often circumvented with using a combination of html and Flash (but thus loosing some of the benefits). First imagine a login form in Flash. Now if you try to use 1Password or any other password manager to store and remember that password for you you will be disappointed. They can’t detect the form to be a login form. Neither does the browser’s native password manager kick in. This forces you to set a password that is easy to remember and thus making it much less safe.

Also, almost shamefully so, somehow Flash does not support undo when editing text. Again this is not a huge problem in most cases (since Flash is usually not used as a text-editing environment) but it is another dent in the UX facade that can irk your user.

However for me the most irking thing about a lot of Flash apps is scrolling. I’m using a MacBook and I’ve grown so used to the comforting double finger scroll that I almost forget how to use a scrollbar. That is until I use a Flash app. Somehow Flash scroll views don’t seem to support mouse wheels out of the box. This issue is somehow overridable but rarely does this happen.

There are other issues that I might have missed; the point is however when deciding what technology to use don’t forget to consider these smaller however important points, especially when designing software that people will need to use on a frequent basis (if you’re doing a casual game then Flash is quite probably perfect for you).