If the Adobe-Omniture deal means anything it’s that with feedback from behaviour tracking Flash developers might finally get around to addressing their applications’ regularly awful user experience.
Designers of Flash apps and widgets seem to go back to the drawing board every single time they make something. They start from scratch each time, creating new and confusing user interfaces to reflect whatever the fashionable paradigm of the time is — whizzy, futuristic dashboard? No problem! Over-elaborate transitions? Easy-peasy! Flash intro on your splash page? No sooner said than done (but is it still 1999?).
The problem with this approach is that with each new app and its innovative bespoke interface, users are regularly forced to learn a new method of navigation. The web has well-established, native patterns of interaction that do everything you need them to. Discoverability, when implemented correctly, is a finely nuanced mechanism for delivering complex systems to the user. But Flash apps are too often clunky, unnavigable, hastily put together bits of software designed to capitalise on trend and satisfy business interests keen on some thing ‘jazzy’ or ‘funky’. Way back in 2000 Jakob Nielsen said that Flash was 99% bad, Flash encouraged design abuse, and made bad design more likely, and not much has changed since he made those statements.
Flash applications avoid many established design patterns, are often explicitly designed to be impermanent, and regularly lack fallback content in the instance of the correct plugin not being installed, but these issues are rarely considered by a business pushing for a snazzy new feature they can parade before their board.
Hopefully the Adobe-Omniture deal will set off a new era of closely-monitored stats which might prove useful in finding where Flash applications and interfaces could be improved, and where using web standards to build a long-term solution might prove a more fruitful endeavour. Of course, Flash analytics can currently be recorded by other analytics tools such as Google Analytics, but Omniture is a far bigger hitter on large scale websites, and where influential Flash design is needed the most in order for good practice to trickle down into common usage.