Skip Intro: Flash Usability and Interface Design

by Duncan McAlester, Michelangelo Capraro
published by New Riders
Buy it at Amazon.com.

Review by Todd Dominey |

Since the first byte of Macromedia Flash content appeared on the web, the application has been a lightning rod of controversy. For the first time, web developers were given a tool that broke the static, HTML based environment of the web with low-bandwidth, dynamic, rich content. While many examples of well-designed Flash based sites exist, countless more suffer from poor interaction, ambiguous navigation, and long download times. Put simply, there’s a lot of bad Flash out there, and Skip Intro: Macromedia Flash Usability and Interface Design, has emerged to help.

Skip Intro: Macromedia Flash Usability and Interface Design demonstrates techniques for creating accessible, effective, and thus more successful Flash content. Through tried and true usability tips and techniques, including audience consideration, communication and the clear structuring of data, the book aims to focus Flash developers on what works, instead of what’s cool.

After a couple of too short chapters covering basic usability / human interface guidelines and techniques, the book dives right in to real-world examples (source code available on included CD-ROM). The first example demonstrates how to create a tried and true “progress bar” preloader that displays just about every piece of information an end user could want. From there, another well worn Flash technique is probed - the scrolling menu - but again with far more options and dynamic behavior.

Other usability examples include contextual menus, hierarchical menus, custom cursors, a tabbed menu interface, search engine, and pop-up tool tips. Not exactly the most ground breaking techniques, but they are useful examples that can be applied to any project.

Skip Intro truly shines by being one of the first books to explain and create custom Components - a completely new feature in Flash MX. By taking a few extra steps to bundle your code as a Component, and attaching dynamic behaviors to it, you can re-use the “engine” over and over, and adapt it to all your projects.

For all the positive factors behind Skip Intro, the book has one major, crushing shortfall - bad proofreading and poor editorial planning. Virtually every chapter suffers from a lack of cohesion between the instructional copy, samples of ActionScript, and application screen shots. The copy all too often instructs the reader one way, while the example images convey a different result. Variable names, layer orders, and chunks of code are either named differently, missing altogether, or contain elements not even mentioned in the copy. To top it all off, some code samples have glaring typographical errors that if directly copied won’t work. While these errors and oversights are not the norm, there are enough to easily frustrate every reader.

The layout and typography is clean, easy to read, but with far too many “Author Notes” and “Tip” side boxes set in tiny Helvetica type. If the material was important enough to warrant obstructive side notes of such frequency and length, why weren’t they included in the main copy?

All told, Skip Intro is a great book for Flash 5 users to brush up on what’s new in MX, offers a fair amount of usability guidelines, but should’t be used as an ActionScript learning tool.

© 2002 Todd Dominey. May not be reproduced without written consent.

" Skip Intro: Flash Usability and Interface Design "
by Duncan McAlester, Michelangelo Capraro
Sale Price: $31.50 / Used Price: $1.95
(Prices updated September 4, 2003 04:32 PM )
Buy it at Amazon.com