Tag Archives: ActiveX

About 4735 days ago Business Software

Four Ways in which Flash Kills

Many of you may now be familiar with the story of Boo.com, which failed in May of this year. The British sportswear outfitter burned through $135 million in venture capital, eventually selling its operations and technology for only hundreds of thousands of dollars after a mere 18 months. The cornerstone of Boo.com’s site was a super high-tech storefront, where users could visually manipulate products in 3-D. It’s a concept that’s not particularly novel — prototypes of 3-D shopping on the Internet were undertaken years ago. But the decision of Boo.com’s management to stretch itself that far into the avant-garde brought with it a pair of stylish concrete booties. The problem many users encountered with this site was not only that it was slow and awkward (cardinal sins in e-commerce), but that users couldn’t even see what the company had to offer without a high-powered machine and the right plug-in. Boo.com is the first example of a phenomenon I call death by Flash. You can expect to see more of it over the next year, as sites that tried to “break out of the box” find that “the box” is where too many of their potential customers live. Certainly, Macromedia Flash software isn’t the only catalyst for inaccessible sites. It’s merely the most common one found today. Java applets, dHTML sites, and ActiveX controls can turn your users away at the door. Unfortunately, “flash” was a popular term for shiny sites before Flash appeared. To avoid confusion, I’ll lump these all together as “shiny stuff,” and explain why dependence on shiny stuff could turn you business into another Boo.com. Shiny Stuff Obscures InformationSites built around Java or plug-ins can’t be searched or indexed by search engines. (This, incidentally, is also the case against content-free splash pages, since search engines can’t find anything to index on the page.) Given that searching is a large part of what makes the Web the spectacular information source that it is, there’s something frustrating about designs that put concept before function. Shiny Stuff Isn’t Accessible to Many UsersI’ll make the hard sell first: Respect the needs of vision-impaired users. Screen readers and voice browsers don’t know what to do with Java or Flash. If you have a blind user browsing your Flash-only front page, you just lost a visitor. More people are likely to pay attention when browsers and platforms become issues. Java doesn’t work well on the Macintosh. If you choose an ActiveX control, you can say good-bye to all your Mac and Unix users. Even Flash, one of the most widely available plug-ins, is troublesome when you’re implementing a newer version of the software than your users have. Shiny Stuff Takes Time to DownloadI’ve been a bleeding-edge type for years. But when Flash 4 came out, and I started hitting sites that wanted to push me the plug-in, I waited and waited and waited, refusing to install the plug-in. Every time the request box to download the plug-in came up in my browser, I refused to download it and went somewhere else. Finally, I took the plunge and installed the plug-in on all my machines, but there were dozens of sites that I overlooked. The fact is, it takes too much time to download even a tiny plug-in, and users don’t like to wait. A designer’s need to push the envelope should never outweigh the users’ need to do what they want to do without frustration. (The same holds true for developers who require too much of the user, as we saw in the era of Web sites that told us they were “Best Viewed with Netscape Navigator 3.0, Beta 2!”) Shiny Stuff Wastes TimeIt’s that simple. On a business site, every three-second animation in a Flash movie means that much time you’ve made your user wait. I’ve seen some of the most brilliant work in Flash — beautiful textures, smooth motion, strong branding — but left in 30 seconds because the transitions were so slow that they suggested self-indulgence, even disdain for the user and the task he or she was trying to complete. Yes, people want to have fun, sometimes. They want to be wowed, sometimes. But with few exceptions, if your goal is to keep people coming back, or to get people to buy your products, leave the shiny stuff alone. Copyright © 1995-2000 Pinnacle WebWorkz Inc. All rights reserved. Do not duplicate or redistribute in any form.

About 4796 days ago E-Commerce

User-Friendly Commerce Sites

Animation, sound, video, and applets of all kinds are considered the “hot ticket” for high-tech Web sites. My question is: Do you know who your end users are? Intranet administrators know who their users are because the network is a closed loop. Software manufacturers use their sites to showcase their wares, so they expect more advanced end users. Artistic and personal sites usually have a specific audience in mind. (Note: This is written with the understanding that your site is a domestic effort, not an international sales effort. Foreign sales and the subsequent “imperial entanglements” are not being considered here.) If you are designing an e-commerce site for the general public, use restraint in applying high-tech elements. There is no way for you to know what version of browser, operating system, connection speed, screen resolution, or color depth your potential customer has on his or her desktop. The goal of an e-commerce site is sales. Sales occur when a customer buys something. You should be aware that the threshold of boredom is dropping like a rock. If the customer can’t see your navigation bars or won’t wait 48 seconds for that fancy graphic to load, you risk losing that potential sale. It’s an imperfect world, and the clients who hire you to build sites for them can be “unique,” to say the least. I get to relearn the old adage “the customer is always right” at least once per job, so I’m very aware of the strain Web site builders can fall under. They may want fancy navigation bars and wild animation on their pages. They may think they want crazy gradient backgrounds that change color as you scroll through the pages. Of course it can be done, but to what degree should it be done, if at all? The best we can do is try to make the clients aware that we have their best interests in mind when we steer them in the direction of a clean, concise Web site. A user-friendly site is one that loads fast and is simple to navigate, easy on the eye, and informative. It will clearly guide the consumer to the item you are selling and allow an effortless purchase procedure. Your site will also have to cater to the lowest common denominator: the new e-commerce customer. K.I.S.S. Keeping it simple means creating a set of rules based on the widest audience and sticking to them. For instance, we chose to design for a particular browser version that we know are Java capable for the most part. If you can figure out a way to avoid using Java applets or elements, so much the better. Mouseovers are very common in site design these days, but sometimes they don’t work (we have noticed this on some sites designed for 3.0 version and earlier browsers and on WebTV). Try not to include any ActiveX controls that require the user to download and install anything; it tends to scare new users, and it diverts their attention from the site. Unless you work for Microsoft or Netscape, avoid the temptation to put a “Designed for Netscape” or “Designed for Internet Explorer” tag on your site. The goal of the site is selling your client’s product, not selling browsers, so who cares? Font selection doesn’t seem like a big problem, but if the look and feel of the site are important, be sure to select a set of fonts likely to be on the end users’ machines (that will give you about four choices). We set our screen resolution to 640 by 480, the smallest practical screen resolution, so that the site we create would not require users to do a horizontal scroll to view it. Horizontal scrolls are annoying and unnecessary with good planning. Strive to use Web-safe colors in your designs to attempt to ensure that what your users see is what you intended them to see. Text links at the bottom (or top) of the site will cover you in case your fancy Java navigation bar fails to load. Use simple terms for your site navigation, so the site visitor has the best chance of finding out where he or she wants to go. Don’t overwhelm the user’s eye with a crowded site body. Keep it simple and clean, and don’t forget that white space is your friend. (Another friend is the spell-check option.) Make sure you test your site against as many possible degrees of user savvy and Web browser versions as possible before you go live. While most of this is basic common sense, one look around the Web will make you wonder if common sense is alive and well or on vacation. Our goals as professional Web site designers should be attention to detail and covering every possible contingency for our client sites. Making sure that the broadest possible user base can access the client site is Step 1. Keeping them there and getting them to spend money on that site is Step 2. Hearing end users say, “It was easy to buy that [insert item here] on your site” is the greatest compliment a site can get. Then again, hearing the client say to you “Great job” isn’t a bad thing, either. Copyright © 1995-2000 Pinnacle WebWorkz Inc. All rights reserved. Do notduplicate or redistribute in any form.