Are you a Flash user constantly fighting the usability war?
Skip Intro is designed to help educate the Flash community specifically and designers/programmers at large that usability isn't a dirty word. It doesn't mean making boring pedestrian web sites, and it doesn't mean abandoning Flash. Quite the contrary, Flash offers advanced usability elements that traditional HTML websites could never hope to achieve. This book will show designers how to start thinking about their users and, more importantly, how to translate that understanding when they start designing or coding.
Skip Intro moves beyond traditional usability books by shying away from listing examples of "why this is wrong" or "why this is right." Instead, it guides designers through understanding the site requirements and their intended users and then starts them down the road of developing for those users, by taking them step-by-step through design scenerios, rather than providing strict rules of usability.
Chapter 5: Scrolling Without Boundaries
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from
magic.
—Arthur C. Clarke
The use of Flash to create information interfaces has enabled designers to
develop many new devices for browsing that information. Although most of these
interfaces are designed to improve the user experience, many are littered with
gimmicks and controls that actually confuse the user.
Among this plethora of experimental interface elements are some that really
do improve usability. One of these is the gesture-driven scrolling list.
As a Flash developer, you've no doubt seen the gesture-driven scrolling
list before. Usually it is a list of image thumbnails arrayed horizontally or
vertically. As the user moves his mouse over the list, it reacts by scrolling in
a direction based on the mouse position or motion.
Author Note: Michelangelo
When we were writing this chapter, it occurred to us that a gesture-driven
scrolling list is actually pretty controversial in the world of usability.
Many usability gurus recommend against using this type of control, and rightly
so; it is an unfamiliar, newer type of navigational widget that many users
might not be familiar with.
Many of the rules of usability rely on interfaces and controls being
intuitive and familiar to the user. Abiding by these rules guarantees that your
users always know how to get around your interface and the site they are looking
at. However, all users are different. In the case of the MODA site, the target
audience was not visiting the site to get through it in the quickest possible
time, but rather, users of the site wanted to spend time and enjoy the
experience of looking at the images on the site. In our informal tests, we even
found that users who had never used this type of scrolling list before learned
to use it almost instantly and found using it to be fun and enjoyable, a key
goal for the target audience of the site.
Remember, the rules of usability that you will read in books or on web sites
are great guides when designing an interface, but the one real rule to
stick to is this: Know your user. In this case, our target user liked the
scrolling list, and it added enjoyment to the site that a boring old scrollbar
would not have.
Ultimately, using standard widgets may be the safest way to ensure maximum
usability of your interface, but if you don't try and develop something new
and better, we could be using the same old scrollbars 10 years from now!
In the gesture-driven list, the speed of scrolling is dictated by the
distance of the mouse cursor from its target. This dramatically reduces the
amount of mouse movement required to control the scrolling. The fact that the
list scrolls by merely having the user move his mouse (this is where the
"gesture" part comes from) also helps by reducing the number of
clicks needed to scroll through the list to...0! Gone are the smaller click
areas of the scroll arrows at each end of the list, and the scrolling
"thumb" in the middle of the scrollbar.
This can be a powerful interface element, but it can truly help improve web
site usability only if the designer spends the time to iron out the details of
how users will interact with it.
In this chapter, you learn how to make your own simple, gesture-driven
component that takes into consideration all the details necessary to improve
Nancy's experience on the MODA site. Keep in mind the issues just discussed
when you take a look at how the scrolling list works in the MODA structure.
