Why I Dislike Flash Banners
Having a strong visual design is a critical element in developing interfaces which engage human beings. We make assumptions on a website’s credibility, quality and level of trust based on the initial first few seconds when the page loads in our browser. Ultimately we live in such a complicated world that through our animal evolution to this point in time (way before the World Wide Web) we developed the ability to make quick satisficing decisions based, to a great degree, on superficial grounds. Or you could just say we’re shallow and quick to pass judgement. Nevertheless, this is a survival skill that saved us from being eaten by large gnarley animals with hungry bellies and smaller brains.
Understanding how humans sort through a complex world of sensory input, and how we make these quick perceptive decisions, allows us to accept that visual design can go overboard in various little ways that affect the users ability to focus on content or utilise the information we’ve provided. In a signal versus noise landscape we definately don’t want to introduce noise into the visual design.
An example of that would be the use of animated flash headers. I would strongly recommend a reasonable amount of thought goes into the necessity to implement a flash header on any project, particularly if its a continuous loop. Regardless of the cool factor justification.
An experiment for the reader. Create a simple web page and put in the header an animated gif of something nasty like a waving American flag. Then cut and paste some interesting content (plagiarise it from anywhere) into the demo page. You’re ready to start reading. After you’ve read the page, you have to admit a large part of your attention was distracted by that simple animation. Its why animated gifs suck. Its why animated Flash headers suck, especially if they loop. Even more especially if they have sound. Even more especially if there is important information to be found on the page but only 70% of a user’s attention can go towards finding and sorting the content.
If your arm is twisted and there is no other option but to use a flash header (the boss tells you this must be so) then consider the option of embedding it on the page in the loaded state and providing a play button (as for all animated / multimedia elements). That makes a little more sense. After all, Flash headers with rolling movement are animations beyond the users control. Nothing more, nothing less. It is incredibly distracting to read content that includes animation without the controls to turn them off.
