Macromedia makes it clear: Flash isn’t quite there yet

I decided the other day that it was time I bought Macromedia Studio MX 2004. So I headed over to Macromedia.com and went to their store, naturally. Their store is done entirely in Flash. It was, without a doubt, the worst online shopping experience I have ever had.

The first thing that was painfully clear was how slow it was. Now I’ll admit I’m on a Mac, and I know quite well that the Mac version of the Flash plugin is slow compared to the Windows version. But I don’t think that’s any excuse. This is not an old computer, it’s a 1GHz G4… The current low-end Macs are barely any faster. If your site is painfully slow on a similar computer, you’re doing something wrong.

I tested again just now and it took 55 seconds for the store to load. Compare that with Apple’s store, which is far more graphics-heavy… ready in 15 seconds. Or Adobe’s store, in just 7.

The next odd thing that happened was a little window popped up to let me know it was making a secure connection. This was apparently necessary since the page hosting the Flash file is not secure at all. Presumably Flash’s interaction was all going through a secure connection, and they wanted to let me know. But why on earth should I trust a little popup window? Why didn’t they just put the whole page on a secure site? I can’t even imagine.

One of Flash’s biggest flaws showed up quickly: the inability to use the back button. I also use keyboard shortcuts quite a bit to go back. Using the back button (or whatever equivalent) is a habit that’s pretty well ingrained in just about everyone. I had to constantly remind myself that I couldn’t use it, and hunt for another way to get back to the page I was just looking at.

Another standard feature I lost was the ability to open a link in a new tab or window. It would have made up for some of the flaws… I could have kept my place better (since I didn’t have a back button) and it would have helped with the slowness as well. But with Flash it just isn’t an option.

At one point I had something in my cart and I was trying to click on the title to get more information about it. (It was an item it had put there “for my convenience” so I didn’t really know what it was.) It kept taking me to my order history, and I couldn’t figure out what was going on it. Finally I realized I was clicking right through the cart to a button that was underneath it. I hid the cart and there was the order history button.

At one point I got stuck in some bizarre infinite loop where it kept reloading the entire page. While I understand bugs can happen, I feel confident in saying this one is something I’ve never seen before in a standard web page. The HTML would reload, that secure connection window would pop up, and then it would close, and as the Flash finally loaded the HTML would reload again. Over and over. Add to that the painful slowness of it all. It took a fair bit of time just to realize it wasn’t going to stop and then do something about it.

I had a lot of other struggles while I tried to figure out what I wanted, but they all revolved around these same issues: the interface was so frustrating and slow that it took me far too long to do anything. It took me a good while just to figure out how I could buy the downloadable version and still have manuals sent to me, for example. And, well, I never did find out. That is, until I gave up, ordered the boxed version, and it finally arrived… without any printed manuals. (Which is a shame, because I’ve found Flash’s help window a bit frustrating to use as well.)

In the end it took me about an hour and fifteen minutes just to figure out what I wanted and place the order. Which is far, far longer than it should have taken. Honestly, I love Flash… It has allowed me to do some things that I couldn’t have done otherwise. Tense Radio is a great example. The problem is it’s far from ready for what Macromedia is using it for. Next time they redesign their store I just hope they ditch the Flash entirely, or improve it by leaps and bounds. It’s a terrible way to sell their product… and I mean that in more ways than one.

Comments

This entry has no comments.

View more

Design

My First WWDC Above: Apple’s live App Store wall at WWDC. It showed icons of 20,000 iPhone apps,…

Getting creative with transparent PNGs for Delivery Status The old Delivery Status graphics system When I started the Delivery Status widget it…

Business Cards My new business cards finally showed up today, and they look awesome. Same as with…

Welcome to Junecloud! When I first started running my own business full time a few years back, I really…