Upon receiving the press release for this article, my first thought was that someone had made an error on the title, but as things turned out, it was for real. In fact, the book was chosen as Macromedia’s site of the day for March 27th, 2002. According to author Kevin Airgid, “The book, the title and everything else was a knee jerk reaction to an article written by Jakob Neilson.” The title? Flash: 99% Bad.

In the article, Neilson states that the use of Flash tends to encourage poor design, it’s not interactive and it detracts from the value of web sites. Kevin Airgid both agrees and disagrees. As he points out: “Flash isn’t the problem, it’s the people building it. It’s like blaming somebody who has been killed by a drunk driver on the car, not on the guy behind the wheel. The car isn’t inherently bad; it’s the person driving it.”

“In the article, Neilson creates a long list of the problems with Flash and his points were definitely on the money. He was right, but wrong at the same time. Neilson gives this long laundry list of usability rules, but how do I integrate this into great design? How do I make a Nike.com out of it? How do I win a Communication Arts site of the week with your strict guidelines? The book and the website are a response back to the Flash community, saying that you can create good design and usability all at the same time. The two aren’t necessarily opposed to each other.”

Nathan: In one chapter of the book, Stephanie, your co-author, talks about a site where you have to hunt for the navigation buttons and things aren’t obvious. What are your comments about that?

Kevin: “(Laughs). It depends on your target audience. It always boils down to that. Jakob makes the statement that all web sites should be the same; that navigation controls should basically be in the same spot. And I agree with him on that. Where I disagree is, let’s say your target audience consists of people in their early twenties who are looking for snowboards. That audience is not going to be turned on by Amazon.com tabs. They want to hunt for navigation, they want interactivity, they want something unusual. It all comes back to targeting your audience.”