Lego bricks

The Lego bricks are not Adobe’s fault, nor are they Apple’s. They are our fault. My fault. The developers and designers that use Flash. Haven’t we known for years that not every device has the Flash Player? Shouldn’t we have designs that fall back gracefully so we don’t just see a big white area with a Lego brick in the middle? As developers that use Flash to make rich experiences, it is our responsibility to provide a useful, well-designed fall back when the user does not have the Flash plug in installed.

Quite frankly, I don’t want the flash plugin running on mobile Safari on my iPhone. It’s bad enough that a majority of the web sites out there look awkward and are unusable on the small screen of the iPhone, to add Flash sites to that would just compound the problem. Have a graceful fall back. If the iPhone user is one of your intended users, then design a version of the experience that doesn’t require a lot of pinching and panning or Flash. This isn’t a Flash developer specific problem, this is a web designer specific problem.

On the iPad, sure it would be nice to have Flash in Safari, but we don’t. That fact doesn’t let us off the hook. We need graceful fall backs that the web designer actually thought about. I’m just as guilty of this as other Flash developers: a totally blank page with 10-point Times Roman stating “this site is for Flash” is clearly a fumble on the designer’s part. SWFObject puts that there so developers can remember to do their homework, not as the fallback users are supposed to see. C’mon folks, how long have we been doing this? We should know better!

While developers are mostly to blame here, they are also the ones trying to solve the problem – thats why tools like SWFObject exists in the first place. Adobe, you need to take responsibility for this and offer better ways for designers to create usable fallbacks on devices that don’t support Flash. Maybe incorporate SWFObject and offer a UI to add a static image, copy, etc. explaining to the user-without-Flash what the deal is.

HTML5 doesn’t change anything

I’ve already outlined what I think about the Flash vs HTML5 argument. There will be a lot of Flash experiences that do in fact get replaced by HTML5, but there are a lot that won’t, shouldn’t, and just can’t be replaced by nature of the richness of the experiences. This is just continuing the evolution we’ve been seeing for a while now, starting with Web 2.0 and standards based web development years ago. It should not be a shock to anyone. If your target audience use iPads, then you have to do the design work necessary to deal with that. Regardless of if we had the Flash in iPad Safari or not, this is still the case!

Apple, let the users decide!

Ok, so on the web side of things, I feel like there are pretty clear mistakes that we, as developers, have made and that we should have been better prepared for. But this whole developer agreement that Apple has changed, that is not so easy to write off.

As I outlined previously, HTML5 won’t replace Flash any time soon. It just won’t and can’t. Coming from a mobile background, I can understand why on these underpowered devices you might not want web pages full of Flash player instances bringing the poor processor to a halt. But thats the web. Html5 shouldn’t be a reason to not include Flash-built applications in the App Store.

We have some great user experiences designers that can create awesome experiences using Flash. If they create one that feels right on the iPad, who cares how it was developed? If users decide it’s good, then it’s good. Users shouldn’t (and mostly don’t) care what the technology of the experience is, especially when it’s a great experience. So let the user decide, by way of ratings and purchases, whether a flash-built app belongs in the store or not.

There are crashing, unstable apps built in Xcode that seem to make it to the store all the time, and users are vocal when they review them, and they review them negatively. There are apps that are really poorly designed, that don’t live up to the standard of some of the other great apps out there. Users have been able to make the choice of installing those apps or not. I see apps that use a “middle layer” all the time in app store apps, its called UIWebView, and sometimes it works and sometimes it doesnt. Users complain when it doesnt and those developers make changes to keep users. The users have (and should have) the power.

So why can’t it be the same with apps built by 3rd party development tools? Apple, I really believe you are missing out on many opportunities for great user experiences on your products by not allowing developers to develop using tools like those Adobe has already built. You are treating your users like mindless drones, incapable of deciding what’s good for themselves. Let users decide!

The right direction?

It seems like there is a user experience emerging here that is less than ideal, but I’ve outlined it in an earlier post and it bears reiterating in the midst of all of this name calling:

• User goes to a web site on their iPad
• It’s a rich, Flash built experience on the desktop computer, but on the iPad a nice static, branded image appears offering a button to tap and download the app from the App Store
• User taps, installs the Flash-built app and tries it out.

See, no Lego bricks, no Flash crashing Safari, no HTML5 vs Flash mumbo jumbo. A happy user is a happy user. Isn’t that what it’s all about?

Apple, Adobe, can you sort this out now so us developers can get back to creating great experiences using your products?

Guesswork: Audience Impact

For my business, and to a larger extent, the interactive advertising community, the primary target for web experiences are desktop users. Most of our ad clients have invested enough in mobile web experiences to offer the “you need a desktop to view this site” type of solution. Flash still dominates many of our sites, not because it’s all we do, but because it has made sense for many reasons I can go into at another time.

We have been getting more requests for iPhone apps, which has added a new market for work, which has been great for vendors in the interactive ad space, but I don’t think this will play out the same way with the iPad. The iPhone is a great web browsing platform, but it really just added to the browsers out there rather than significantly replace any of the desktop browser audience in a serious way. With the possible iPad success, that changes: the iPad will start to replace those laptops, desktops, and netbooks that right now look and act just like any desktop browser to us. This is where we see the biggest changes to our work, and not having Flash support has some pretty big implications.

No Flash

Aside from the kids sites and games sites that have been tossed around in the ring, there are a lot of web experiences that, up until now, could only be created in Flash. A quick look at the Sites of the Year over at FWA reveal sites like Get the Glass, Vodafone Future Vision, Audi R8, The Eco Zoo, We Choose the Moon, Philips Bodygroom, Elf Yourself, and countless others. These are the types of sites we use Flash for and that many of our ad clients request.

With the iPad, we have a potential new browser on the market that doesn’t support the one viewport we could most relay upon to consistently deliver the interactivity and design precision we and our ad clients desire. This is not like having to deal with the collection of browsers we have today (even if you included IE6) where, for the most part, we could count on Flash to work consistently across all platforms that are supported (including those old crusty browsers). While we do safely degrade to non-Flash, non-JavaScript versions for that small percent of users that happen to meet those criteria, we have been pretty confident with our work being seen, again, consistently, by a large portion of the web audience. This will change with the iPad.

Did you catch that?

Up until now, the richer ad/brand experiences have gone something like:

1. Friend says “check out cool site for FooBar”
2. You go to site for FooBar, interact and hopefully enjoy

Now there will be the occasional download of plug-in, etc. but we can count on smooth sailing for at about 90% of users across most laptop/desktops. Now, on the iPad it will be:

1. Friend says “check out cool site for FooBar”
2. You go to site for Foobar (on your iPad)
3. You click the link to download the FooBar app from App Store
4. You Launch App for FooBar and interact and hopefully enjoy

It doesn’t seem like a huge difference, but those extra two steps go a long way in making this particular brand experience a lot more work for the user, and potentially a bigger let down – a negative experience attributed to FooBar.

Gone is that easy experience of getting a site referral, or seeing a URL on a billboard and getting a fun (or not) interactive experience that you didn’t have to do more than type in a URL for. The effort was low so the pay-off seemed greater. With the iPad experience, the initial effort for the user is higher, so the pay-off has to be much better.

The pay-off

When the Flash plug-in was not the ubiquitous tool we have today, the prospect of requiring users to download a plug-in was something that was scary for us and our clients – we don’t want the user to jump through installation hoops for a few minutes of branded game-playing. Now we don’t worry so much, because Flash is so prevalent. We take the pay-off for granted because the audience for our client’s site is not feeling any extra burden for that additional richness in their web experience.

Now we are back to square one, where some of our audience may have to download an app that may take some time to download. They may even forget they were downloading it, or, what I think is more likely, they may choose not to download it. For our clients to get to those users, they have to have apps with real pay-off, enough to convince users to download the app and keep that download on their iPad long enough to have that interactive brand experience. For sites like Get the Glass, an iPad variation could make sense and you could see that app experience holding its own in the world of the App Store because it’s primarily a game experience. But what about the Vodafone Future Vision site? That’s a great site to stumble on or get passed to you via email or IM, but would you sit and download potentially hundreds of megs and install the app for this cool presentation? I love the experience as a web site, but as an iPad app I’m not so sure it’s suited. The client would have to have an iPad-specific experience, or decide the iPad users don’t get the richer brand experience that we do on the laptops, desktops, and netbooks. And you can’t expect to Elf Yourself on an iPad without a camera.

Convincing the clients

Today, when we are contracted to design and build an interactive brand experience in Flash, convincing our ad clients that we need to invest in a non-Flash experience, or a mobile-web-specific experience is difficult because you want to spend your budget on the cool stuff, on the wow factor. Soon, we will need to convince the client that they need extra budget to develop a separate site for this very specific browser market, that isn’t really that huge (not for a while anyway).

Using Adobe’s upcoming tools, we could export the Flash experience to an iPhone/iPad app and get users to download and install it. But wouldn’t we want to take advantage of the iPad’s awesome touch-oriented experience? Convincing the client of that will be even more difficult. So in the end, the iPad audience get’s the short end of the user experience stick.

Brand experiences on the iPad

It is inevitable that early iPad users will suffer the “you need to be on a desktop or laptop to view this experience” type of road block. Until our clients see a need to develop specific brand experiences via iPad-tailored HTML sites or App Store apps, we won’t get a lot of extra budget to make experiences solely for the iPad, especially for iPad apps that have to have a much bigger pay-off for the user.

I had been thinking that the iPad’s saving grace may just be the looming, possible proliferation of PC tablets – that will certainly increase the touch-sensitive tablet user audience and give vendors like us an opportunity to develop more tablet-sensitive brand experiences. Then again, the other tablets out there will likely support Flash, so it may be we will have to get used to the less friendly brand experience the iPad seems to be pushing on us. Either way, there’s a new type of interactive ad/brand experience coming.