A colleague of mine sent this to me. http://www.useit.com/alertbox/20001029.html
Why is a nearly 10 year old article relevant now? Well, because 10 years ago, we weren’t going to User Experience Meet-Ups, Interaction Designers were still called Web Masters and no one was tweeting.
With the iPhone 4 unveiling yesterday, aside from talk of pre-orders and FaceTime, Flash’s place in mobile devices and the web in general are again in conversation among techies. In case you’ve missed it, here are Steve Job’s Thoughts on Flash. That’s a pretty big blow to Flash.
Staying or Going?
In the end, it is really the users that decide what stays or goes? If Flash were to go away, it should have gone away 10 years ago as the above article perpetuated it way across the web but users still wanted it so it stayed. 10 years later, we need to ask ourselves, “Do I really need to see a moving bouncing ball fade into some exploding lines of text?” Apologies to Flash Developers for over-simplifying Flash, I know that there are some really cool Flash applications out there. Over the years, I’ve seen less and less Flash intros which is a testiment to a simple truth – novelty eventually wears off.
Content
The bottom line, no matter how you slice it, is content. It has always been content, though 10 years ago, the buzz word was Rich Media and at the time, Flash was the delivery mechanism for it. Now that browsers and client devices have evolved, the sizzle of presentation is a given and we can finally get back to content. Content Strategy must be the driver for all design projects.