Further to my previous post regarding the Adobe-Omniture deal, and how it might improve the consistently awful Flash user experience people regularly have to deal with, this morning I found a very good example of bad Flash interface design to illustrate my point with.
The weekend of 19th and 20th September is London Open House weekend, when the public gets wide and varied access to the architectural pleasures of the City. Unfortunately, while Open House do publish a printed programme, the only way to discover locations of Open House participants online is through a fairly complex and ugly search form at http://www.londonopenhouse.org/public/london/find/. This method is not an intuitive way to find Open House locations, and does not encourage discovery or serendipity.
However, there is a map at Wallpaper magazine’s website. While this could have been a useful alternative to the official listings, it is instead problematic and discouraging. The Wallpaper site features a Google map, overlaid with a Flash map. There are several problems:
- The Wallpaper Flash map features only a selection of the full listings. They call this the Wallpaper Edit. For the full listing you must still consult the printed programme or use the official search form.
- The Wallpaper Flash map is extremely simplified, and lacks context, scale and travel information, as well as several other navigation aids.
- The Wallpaper Flash map uses an entirely new and different navigation method. There is no drag control, and no zoom. Instead, the user needs to click on buttons near the top of the map which signify arbitrary areas of London. There is no option to show partial areas or the whole map at once.
- The Wallpaper Flash map uses an entirely different scale to the accompanying standard image-based Google map. Changes in the orientation of one map are not reflected in the other, making switching between the two extremely disorienting.
- The Wallpaper Flash map uses bespoke markers and a bespoke popup system, which opens a popup at the top left of the map, completely out of context of the click event. The Google map operates in an expected way, much as other web standards-based online maps do, by opening the popup at the location of the click event, where the user is focused.
The frustrating thing about Wallpaper using a custom Flash interface is that the Google map view already provides all the functionality the user needs, in an established, expected way, and in many ways in offers a superior user experience. Control of the Google map is more granular and direct, and the user benefits from the extra context and transport directions functionality. In addition, in case of the popup, the Google map provides more information, in the form of opening times. Even simple things, like the detail text being copyable, make the Google map a far more suitable implementation.
The Wallpaper Open House Flash map interface is a perfect example of the continued redundancy of Flash interface design, it’s ability to encourage design abuse, the lack of understanding of user behavioural patterns and the skewed importance of brand over usability.