About 99% of the time, the presence of Flash on a website constitutes a usability disease. Although there are rare occurrences of good Flash design (it even adds value on occasion), the use of Flash typically lowers usability. In most cases, we would be better off if these multimedia objects were removed.
Flash tends to degrade websites for three reasons: it encourages design abuse, it breaks with the Web's fundamental interaction principles, and it distracts attention from the site's core value.
-----Jakob Nielsen “Flash: 99% bad”
I was a junior high student when I first time heard of “Flash”. Actually I was taught how to create Flash animations in a computer course. I was never a computer person and that was why I was not able to create any good flash animation, so I hated flash and meanwhile worship to those people who can make really cool flash animations. That was pretty much my initial impression to Flash.
A decade ago, indeed, it seems really outstanding with cool flash animations on the website. It was kind of show-off thing to let people know you have technology genius in your team. But as technology develops and people gradually have a different perspective to technology---- people are looking at the substantiality of technology instead of its fancy appearance. Nowadays, with huge amount of information opened to the public, when people open a website, what they really need is available and useful information. Anything that is not relevant to the useful information can be considered as distraction or simply just useless stuff. The core of designing a website has been shifted from being fancy to the emphasizing on usability.
Here is some examples that illustrate flash is a distraction to people who try to read the website.
Look how fancy the flash is… but the problem is that it takes long time to load the page. I was wondering what is this website for at the moment I clicked it. What was funny was that I still not figuring out what is the website for even after the whole index has done loading and appeared. Yes, the flash is fancy, nice work. But what is that for? It distracts the readers’ attention to the navigation bar, and not giving any clue of the function or purpose of the website. This is what I consider showing off and overusing flash and the annoying navigation bar.
http://www.jonespartners.com/
http://spaceflight.nasa.gov/shuttle/archives/sts-108/flash/sts108.swf
Check them out!! Flash…flash… flash….
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