A case study in Flash UI annoyances: style-card.com

Brian Dillard, Tuesday, May 20, 2008 @ 2:16 pm

Maybe I read too much Victorian literature, but I've always wanted a personal calling card. Recently, I decided to get one: a little something to help new acquaintances remember my phone number, email address and important URLs. Based on a recommendation from Time Out Chicago, I turned to Style Card, a slick consumer service that promises a less generic riff on the basic business card.

Here's how the company describes its product:

It's a social networking card created by you for the purpose of sharing your details and your style. Let people get to know the real you – or the not-so-real you.

Sure, I could have fired up an Adobe product, used a commercial printing service and gotten 1,000 copies of my own design for about $25. But owing to my lack of graphic design mojo, I decided to shell out $59 (plus shipping) for a mere 80 shiny, round-cornered Style Cards. The 3,000 percent markup is ridiculous, but I wanted to see whether I could benefit from the company's idiot-proof design interface. Besides, I figured I could get a blog post out of the experience. I wasn't wrong.

You see, even though I chose to build my calling card in a web application, I was still stuck using an Adobe product. The Style Card application is built entirely in Flash, and its UI underscores everything I hate about the way many Flash applications are built:

• Inscrutable icons in place of links, buttons and tooltips.
• A document-centric, desktop-style free-for-all when a step-by-step process would feel more comfortable to most users.
• Tiny, unreadable text.
• No full-page zoom.
• No text zoom.
• No tabbing between fields.
• No back button support.
• A login screen that displays my password in plaintext!

To be fair, most of these problems are the fault of the Flash individual developers, not the platform itself. Many standard browser behaviors can be mimicked in Flash. But that's an inherent weakness of proprietary platforms: the need to take extra steps just to attain the status quo. Why not use standard technologies that already respond to standard interface commands?

The only piece of the Style Card interface that would take extra work to implement with web standards is the (rather underwhelming) color picker. As for the application's broader usability issues, well, let's just say I wouldn't send my mom or my grandma to this site without expecting at least one tech-support call.

Ultimately, my new calling cards serve the purpose for which they're intended. But every time I hand one out, I flash back - pun absolutely intended - to the terrible experience I had designing them. It's interesting that a company selling a glossy accoutrement for the Web 2.0 age exhibits such little talent for software design. I almost want to implement the Style Card interface in Ajax, with tons of usability improvements to go along with the platform change.

One final note to the Style Card folks: If you're going to charge your customers luxury prices for commodity goods, perhaps you shouldn't slap an ad for your company on every unit. Then again, I guess the style-card.com URL slapped on my personal calling card is no different from the Louis Vuitton logo on a $5,000 handbag.

agile ajax

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