Preserving the Back Button in Flash
By: Chris Spiek
When you use a Flash movie as the primary element of a website (including the site’s navigation, etc), your visitors expect it to behave like a website, not a Flash movie.
I’m a Seinfeld nut, and I’m also a big fan of those “HP Hand Commercials” that show you what celebrities are doing on their computers. I recently heard that Jerry Seinfeld had done one, and wanted to go online to check it out. I Googled “HP Seinfeld” and went to the site.
Besides wanting to watch the spot, I wasn’t sure what I was there for, so I started clicking around in the primary navigation. Every time I hit the back button to return to the main page of the micro site, I was taken back to Google; so much for a good user experience. I finally made my way down the primary nav to “Watch Jerry’s TV Spot” and then left the site.
Here’s the important part. In this instance HP overcame this usability flaw for a number of reasons (I was determined to see the spot, and I knew that the HP site was the best place to view it, so I was willing to put up with the flaws). What if you’re the small/medium sized e-business competing for people’s attention online? You’re not going to have that luxury, and chances are you’re not going to overcome a usability shortcoming such as this one.
Making the back button work in Flash is typically not a difficult thing to do. Google something like “back button flash” and you’ll find article after article on different approaches.
