Web Sites Ethiopia

Choosing to integrate multimedia into your designs can come with a huge cost: restricting user access to your site, distracting users to the point of departure, or simply crashing their browser.

At the same time, interactivity and multimedia elements can be very powerful for conveying information beyond that of text, diagrammatic representations, or static images.

This is a tradeoff! If you choose to integrate such twinkles, you must be sure to understand their limitations and make a conscious effort to provide the most highly usable context possible.

There are times when interactivity and multimedia can be used to increase comprehension or facilitate understanding and information retrieval. In addition, they can be used to enhance the user experience.

However, these advantages must be competently weighed against the restrictions and distractions such techniques often incur. The goal of this section is to make you aware of the potential usability issues involved in employing interactivity and multimedia and to allow you to make a conscious choice of the tradeoffs involved in adopting such techniques.

Animation
Animation can be a very powerful means of conveying information. It is also a very effective way to mislead, distract, and aggravate users. Animation has repeatedly been shown to distract users.

Users would escape from animations by covering the screen with their hands or scrolling animated objects off the display (Spool, Scanlon, Schroeder, and Snyder, 1997). Animation triggers our attention through our low-level visual processes, and as such it is difficult to avoid. However, users do adapt and may ignore your animation entirely.

Thus, animation can cause problems, particularly if you are developing a site where users are searching for information or skimming the page contents. However, there are some advantages to animation. It can be used to help people find information more easily or to describe processes that are difficult to explain simply with text or static diagrammatic representations. Animation can also make information significantly more engaging for the viewer.

If you plan to use animation on your site, be sure to keep some of these guidelines in mind. Animation should support the user’s goals and tasks. You can use animation to elaborate or clarify processes that are not possible to describe in text. That is, animation can be used to convey content, not merely to decorate.

Try to keep the animation from looping infinitely (if the user has stayed on a page long enough, it is likely he or she is looking for information on that page and an animation will only serve to distract). Use only a single animation per page, and use it to bring the viewer to the focal point of the page. Animation seriously distracts the eye, so multiple animations can cause a conflict as to where to look on the page.

Macromedia Flash
Flash movies enable highly interactive, animated, multimedia experiences. The use of Flash involves some significant tradeoffs. At the time of this writing, a major concern is what percentage of users actually have the plug-in installed (and the latest version of the plug-in). While Flash can be used quite effectively to provide higher levels of interactivity and more interesting online animation, each use must be carefully considered to make sure that it provides value to the end user without causing problems. The following are some tips for applying Flash with minimal disruption for users.

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