So if you haven’t noticed mtv.com has re-engineered its whole website. They’ve jumped back down to a lo-fi, html based site. Why did they do it? The number one complaint was that people started complaining that Flash was too big and slow to load. Well that was a given. Its very easy for someone to make that mistake with Flash. I’ll fully admit that I have too. And I’d like to give a quick warning to all new Flash developers out their to limit how much cool stuff you do. Cause you can really go nuts with Flash. Stop yourself. Redesign it. Simpler is always better for the web. Mtv.com put a huge video, 4 ads, 4 other images and a large menu system on its Flash front page which probably killed 56k modems. And they’re out there. So watch your stats closely and design around that.
So what was the 2nd biggest mistake ever? Well the first from my generation was to stop playing music videos. Being big music fan, I personally just stopped watching MTV all together. But the move to lo-fi was probably the second biggest mistake. Rich Internet Apps are the way to go especially for MTV, they needed to redesign the application for speed but still be able to provide the great broadband experience. Its possible to have the best of both worlds. There are people out there using Flash with no “slow to load” complaints. So watch how you design your sites!
What’s more interesting about the ‘lack of design’ subject is that just this morning Ryan Stewart is talking about the lack of designers in this space. So I’m thinking to myself…Wow, companies are going to start throwing money at these SilverLight/Flex projects and the developers are gonna go nuts and all of these projects are gonna piss off their users. Maybe there should be some type of RIA design guide we should be following?
