Flash Application Design Solutions: The Flash Usability Handbook (Solutions)

Flash’s reputation has improved, due to a general increase in usability awareness, and improved software features. These days, the average Flash site can be just as usable and compact as its HTML counterparts—and better looking and more dynamic. But how do you design and develop a professional, usable, and visually appealing Flash site, that provides users with a memorable and enjoyable online experience? In Flash Design Solutions, Craig Bryant and Ka Wai Cheung show you how. This book is like the Flash version of Dan Cederholm’s popular Web Standards Solutions (ISBN 1590593812). It will support the new version of Flash, out later this year. The authors first examine the general area of usability design, showing how it applies to Flash. Then they explore the different elements of a typical Flash site: navigation menus, feedback forms, and data storage and display. The authors discuss the problems associated with each feature, and explain how to overcome these difficulties with the help of easy-to-follow tutorials. Finally, they fit all of the pieces together to form a complete, online-store application. This application features a usable, attractive front end and a well-designed code framework to run things in the background, allowing graceful maintenance and extension of the application.