*quick edit: I’ve gone ahead and included some of the anonymous answers on the survey in long form and completely unedited. If you are interested in reading these responses, please click here. If you have yet to read this entire article, I strongly suggest you do that first – unless, of course, you enjoy being confused…
THE QUESTION
About three weeks ago I openly asked the following question on Twitter:
Why? Well, for whatever reason I struggle with Flash implementations because I always feel like I’m waiting. Loading bars are no longer cool to me, but rather a reminder that I’m actually waiting. Also, I don’t like that a simple website can take up 90% of my system resources. Mostly I don’t like having to “re-learn” how to navigate what I feel like should be a simple site. Some Flash portfolios make me feel dumb. How the @#$%! do I control this thing?! They seem to vary wildly in how they are controlled – not all of them, but enough to annoy me. If I have to wait too long, can’t figure out how to control your site, stare at a loading bar… I’m gone 80% of the time. I’m not necessarily proud of it. These are just my opinions so please don’t read too much into it – opinions people. Not a sword I’d fall heavily on and I’m not tell you to feel this way
nonetheless…
The question elicited quite a few responses from people who shared much of the same sentiment. The amount of responses I received, within minutes, was surprising. People shared things like “I can’t stand the loading times!” or “Lack of iDevice support ruins the experience for me!” Other people complained about the ability to control the platform. Let’s get one thing straight – I don’t hate Flash and I’m certainly not against using it for the most part. It’s a great and often quick way for photographers to get an immediate web-presence and is an absolute lifesaver for those who don’t have the time or skill to throw something else up. It’s a tool, just like everything else – tools have limitations.
What is it exactly that bothers some people about Flash-based portfolios?
I decided to send out just a few emails asking friends what they thought. The responses were interesting:
“When I’m on the desktop and come across a Flash website, I get frustrated at the loading time, and then when it does load, if it’s a slideshow I often get frustrated that it is too slow, or too fast. I would prefer to click on images I want to see at my own pace.” – Zoë Ambler (@phozographer)
“Often the flash animations seem to take more importance than the work in the profile.” – Joel Kooistra (@JoelKooistra)
“Flash sites don’t allow the user/customer/viewer to control his/her interaction with the site. I can’t pick the images I want to open and I have to wait for an image to load once I select it.” Lane Davis (@lanedavis)
“Flash solves a lot of [problems] – except for mobile. However, like most things, once they are overused, or used as a crutch, [they]fall out of favor. I think Flash portfolio’s solve the problems of everyone but the user or viewer.” – Eric Dacus (@edacus)
“Speed is a big issue. I’m not on communist China’s broadband, but I am impatient and,at times, time-limited. Watching a line crawl, a spoke spin, numbers slowly increase, etc. is extremely annoying”. – Matthew Connors (@MatthewJConnors)
“The clincher with Flash is that it doesn’t work on an ipad. It doesn’t matter if you hate apple for not implementing Flash. There are x billion ipads sold and it is the perfect way to look at images so if you use Flash you are out of the loop.” – Robert van Koesveld (@photokoesveld)
“Flash does not easily allow you to make hyperlinks to [other] specific parts of your site.” – Jared Erickson (@alliswell)
“Basically, unless you’re building your brand around more of an “idea” and an “experience” and don’t really care about good branding or what’s best for you or your clientele, Flash is always a lose.” – Zach McNair (@zachmcnair)
THE RESEARCH
I decided to dig a bit deeper and go ahead and send out a mass survey to a sizable group of people and see what kind of results came back. The survey covered the following subjects.
- How user friendly do you find most Flash-based websites? Do you generally enjoy the experience?
- Do you feel in control of your experience on Flash-based websites?
- Have you ever just simply left a Flash-based website because it was Flash?
- Is speed ever an issue?
- How much time do you spend on a mobile/iDevies daily?
The results are as follows:
SOME RESULTS… BUT REALLY MORE QUESTIONS:
The results were interesting and probably raised more questions than they answer for me. Most of these topics were asked in comparison to other portfolio platforms that are not Flash based. Some of these numbers are staggering to me:
- Only 23% of the people I surveyed said they had generally, at best, a “non-hindered” experience with Flash based portfolios
- Only freaking 4% said they “almost always” enjoy their Flash experience while 43% say it’s a pain?!?
- 4% said they feel more in control of a Flash-based portfolio versus other non-Flash-based portfolios.
- 55% of surveyed people are online more than 3 hours per day with a mobile device; 74% more than 2 hours per day.
- Only 9% of people surveyed say they never have the urge to simply leave a Flash website.
- More than 50% of people surveyed say they describe the experience as “Boxy and confined”
There is unarguably value to knowing what your user base thinks – but these results raise more than a few questions:
- What should we do as users become less and less patient & more and more mobile?
- Are we limiting our audience by the platform we use – specifically with iDevices?
- More and more web dev’s are moving away from Flash for more versatile platforms. Of the 5 developers I surveyed, none of them have designed a flash website post 2004.
- What should this say about the prevalence of Flash among photographers? Behind the times or not?
- Not all Flash implementations are the same, but do the majority of bad implementations influence user’s feelings about the good ones?
FINAL THOUGHTS
A person’s body of work SHOULD speak for itself. By all means we should be worrying more about our body of work than our website. At the same time we should be asking ourselves these questions. What do you think?
What do you think about the reputation, strengths, and weaknesses of Flash based portfolios?
*notes: I’m not a polling genius (or smart) and probably did all sorts of things wrong – if you are freaking out about that, don’t miss the point here. It’s a discusion and these are some starting points for that discussion. The questions present are honest questions and any bias read into them is totally my dumb fault.
Again people, these are a large collection of opinions – the survey, like all surveys, is based on user opinion. I’d have love to go more indepth with this, but it was a long enough post as it is.
What are your thoughts on the questions these results raise?
Again people, these are a large collection of opinions – the survey, like all surveys, is based on user opinion. I’d have love to go more indepth with this, but it was a long enough post as it is.
What are your thoughts on the questions these results raise?
I don’t think it is the platform but the programmers that are the problem. I’ve seen enough bad Javascript and html to last a lifetime also. Flash is ok if it is done right much like some photo processing. Done wrong it is a real pain but then I blame the programmer not the platform.
True – great thought… unfortunately you see very few people complaining about bad JS implementations – I think their are bad implementations of everything, and more times than not people actually think that JS is indeed Flash. This raises the question, is Flash getting a black eye from other things that aren’t even flash?!
Full disclosure: I am one of the folks that completed Brian’s questionnaire, and I’m not a huge fan of flash sites.
That being said, I think this discussion boils down a great degree to site usability, and I don’t think it’s usability between photographers. It’s usability between a photographer and his/her client (which might possibly well be other photographers, mind you). Usability, a web buzz word, in this case includes not only the functionality of the site, but it also concerns the way a site looks to the client. I hate saying it, but it makes sense that “looks” matter in the picture business.
If I was bride-to-be and the majority of the wedding photographer sites I shopped were flash-based with music, and I came across a HTML site without as much finesse or polish, I might just look over the latter. That being said, if I was a wedding photographer, I don’t know if I could bargain against the notion that someone might gloss over my site if it didn’t have the frills of a flash-based site, i.e. part of the wedding planning experience for a lot of people.
On the other hand, if I am primarily a magazine photographer (which I am), I know my clientele don’t have discretionary time at their hands to wait on my flash-based site to load, view an intro slideshow or graphic, watch the buttons swoosh in from the side, and then after clicking on “Portraits,” wait for that gallery to load (this is a fairly extreme example, I’ll give you that). I can’t afford more exits from my site than entrances based on this possibility. Even though I think designers have the right idea in mind when they develop sites with both Flash and HTML options (and the family and wedding part of the industry is right to adopt this as primary practice), editorial photographers like me often decide that landing on a page that makes you choose between the two is just one more step that may cost them an editor’s eyeballs.
This is a big discussion, and it only becomes larger when you really consider who’s more important. The client, or your contemporaries? Place mobile device accessibility in the mix, and the question grows, and grows, and grows. It’s a consideration every photographer must look at at some point in their online life, if not more than once. On the technical side, it’s a rather pragmatic decision to make, while stylistically it’s not as objectively charged.
Jerod, I must disagree with you. I am a documentary photographer and I also have a second website which is only for my wedding work and is all html – http://www.fotowala.in . It is doing very well and I get a lot of incoming traffic and a bounce rate of less than 1%!!! The overall impression that it generates is fantastic. I find it very easy to work on SEO which brings me to the top of the google search. My clients are not the wedding planners but couples who like to see my pictures and feel more comfortable with the simple and accessible website. Choosing a WP template for the site was a great idea.
Hey Sephi, thanks for the reply, and I hope all is well your way! I couldn’t agree with you more. If I came across sounding like one form of site is better than the other, I apologize, because it’s not my intention to be polemical on this issue. I simply wanted to point out one of the several justifications for having either format as it might look for segments of the industry (my use of the family and wedding market is just from personal observation of where many flash-based site services are marketed). I’m 100% behind your perspective on HTML sites, especially from an SEO and technical (and very often aesthetic) usability stand point. I also use a WP template for my site, and I’ve also considered pushing my Livebooks presence (although I’m still not certain about how I’m going to integrate it with the vision for my site’s future). Regardless, I just think it’s appropriate in a discussion such as this to point out how often the client can “experience” a site differently across the many components of this industry. Without getting in to too much trouble, I would consider the growth of a more web savvy society (not just in generation) resulting in a lean toward simplicity and overt usability that HTML offers (I’ve certainly noticed this with my site, and it sounds like you do as well). However, I also see reasoning in some photographer’s decisions to maintain a Flash-based site that they use to create another type of experience, and one that customers and potential clients enjoy.
For the record, though, “long live HTML.” Ha!
It’s probably a good question to ask – how many photographers have more than one online web portal presence – I know I have at least 3 – Portfolio, Website, Company Website.
Im not a good sample because I write most of them myself – If I use WordPress, which I do, I custom build a theme around my own personal designs – most people don’t have that experience or that ability. I would assume that many people use different platforms for different solutions (ie, blog, website, portfolio)
Flash is not the enemy, and to be completely fair, these numbers MUST be compared against peoples trends on non-flash websites. I tend to leave a lot of websites simply because NOTHING has loaded – and most of those, in these cases, tend to be flash – most people stay if they can watch things load… even more slowly. The problem with Flash is often that it’s loading but you dont know it… or you do and you decided you don’t want to wait for that little loading bar to work it’s way across the screen.
Their is a train of thought in web design that if the person can see the page loading – albet piece by piece, they are much more likely to stay on a web page longer because the brain is engaged whether the user knows it or not. I find this to be one of the major flaws of the Flash framework and one that can easily be addresses.
Each part of the photography industry probably has, and should have, a different look – we are all trying to capture our target audience. If you’r target is North American brides-to-be, I can say they do prefer the glitzy, useless, slow as a dead camel Flash sites with Michael Bubble slowly making them imagine their wedding day. (This coming from a decade of web work) – In this, I see Jerod’s point – the point being that 0.7% of the US population gets married annually while I’m sure a much higher percentage than that pick up a digital camera for the first time annually (Im actually not sure)
Sephi – isn’t your bride clientele more of an overseas clientele. If so, I can’t even come close to speaking very educatedly about that, despite shooting 3 international weddings last year I would assume that your popularity has much to do w/ the fact that you are in more of an international wedding photographer niche. I’m not sure though, and I do see your point!
So the question of what segment to you marginalize is almost always a question people have to ask – in politics, marketing, design, etc.
Brian, this has probably been a very obvious thing for many but I don’t recall anyone actually running a survey till now. good job. I looked into this mater when I was making a new website a couple of years back and thought that the flash sites are indeed a nuisance for all the reasons mentioned above. I chose to go with a Word Press template and I never looked back. SEO was also a major factor in my decision although I know that some flash websites have a mirror html site for SEO. Saying all that, I have been recently considering getting a LiveBooks flash website for a portfolio in addition to my html website that acts more like a blog. Some flash websites, despite of all the mentioned faults, do offer a beautiful and professional looking large image presentation.
There are many really good implementations out there – livebooks, whiteloupe(like that one), etc – the question that needs to be asked I think is that even though their are great looking implementations, do they actually lose an “edge” if you will due to the internet being populated by REALLY bad implementations – for me personally, I see a flash website and something just switches inside me and I think “Oh brother, here we go again!”
I truly believe with the invent and spreading use of HTML5 that Flash could be in it’s final years – don’t quote me on that!!
Thanks again for your comment(s) Sephi!
Cheers!
B
An interesting survey Brian. Not too surprised with the results and I’d say you pointed out the most jarring answers. If I were in the design stages of a website, this poll would steer me clear of using a Flash-based layout. I’m not a developer. But I get introduced to related and sister topics in some of my reading. I think that the tide is turning negatively for Flash, in part because of Apple’s avoidance and criticisms of it on their iOS mobile systems and in part because developers and bloggers have been more vocally criticizing its stability and boxed-in development control. I think both are subtly leaking into the public’s opinion of Flash. In my opinion, photographers, or any business that relies on the web to disseminate and promote their work, can’t ignore the wave of mobile web-browsing that is beginning to take hold. I personally know of several people that have begun leaving their laptops at home to carry iPads. I realize that Apple isn’t the only producer of mobile products, but, most importantly for me, in the US and in my base of clients Apple is certainly the leader.
Of the 5 developers that you surveyed, not a statistically significant number by any means, but still, none have made a Flash-based website in years. That fact doesn’t bode well for Flash. It’s obvious other (preferred?) choices exist.
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