The explosion of personal computer use over the last quarter century has led to an entirely new culture for which the “rules” are an evolving body of knowledge. While many proper guidelines are still very much up for debate, there are still some pretty well established norms that most of us tend to follow. Perhaps we can have some fun discussing our own experiences working with others on computers, and maybe years from now we can look back on these articles and see how much has changed.

This series of articles will look at proper etiquette both for computer users and for designers, both of hardware and of software.

Articles in this series:

Steer clear of proprietary technology

Remember surfing to your favorite web sites back in 1998?

Thank god lazy web site designers don’t get away with this sort of nonsense anymore, right? Well, not quite. While we no longer have to be forced into a particular browser to view our favorite content anymore, companies are still forcing us to use particular technologies at an alarming rate.

Now, the message is something like this:

I ask you, what’s the difference? Haven’t we learned anything in the last decade?

Web site designers: Stop doing this. Owners of companies hiring web site designers and forcing them to use Flash and other proprietary technology on your web sites in order to make them more “cutting edge”: Stop doing this. Please.

You think the site is cool and hip. But what you’re doing is slamming the door on an increasing number of customers.

This is like refusing to sell someone shoes because he drove a Ford to your store instead of a Toyota.

And for those of you who are now saying “Well, Flash is installed on 98% of all computers out there, anyway.” You’re missing the point. Flash could be on 100% of the desktop computers and laptops, and it wouldn’t matter. Because that’s not where I’m doing my research anymore.

Here’s a scenario for you. I’m visiting LA next weekend, as I tend to do a couple of times a year. Let’s say I’m cruising around the city a bit, doing various things, and I realize that it’s close to dinner time. So I whip out my iPhone and use the Yelp application to find a restaurant nearby. I find a place with rave reviews in my price range. So far, so good. So I decide to check their web site to have a look at the menu. And I get this:

FAIL. I immediately go to the next place on Yelp.

Why? Because if you’re a restaurant, even more so than for other types of businesses, your site needs to work on mobile phones. I need to at least be able to get to the pertinent information with ease. Address, hours, menu. If I can’t get that, I go elsewhere.

Take a look at that picture above again. The only thing that’s accessible to me on this site is the restaurant’s cute history. Sounds like a compelling story, but the entire navigational system is locked inside a piece of Flash I can’t access. No address. No hours. No menu.

Useless.

Now I hear some of you saying that this is Apple’s fault. They should support Flash on the iPhone so that I can use the site. Really? How many other phones support Flash right now? And how many of those actually support the full Flash, not the crippled Flash Lite, which is just as useless if the site you are trying to access wasn’t created in a much older, deprecated ActionScript 2.0?

In case you didn’ t know, that number would be zero. There is no such thing as a mobile phone that can fully access every Flash site. Flash is simply too resource hungry for any mobile device to handle without killing the battery and slowing the browser to a crawl.

So even if every phone had Flash, in other words, every designer would still have to use a crippled set of tools within Flash to make sure it worked on mobile phones. Why not just leave Flash out of the design in the first place?

Even if my phone could support Flash, I could choose to not allow Flash content on my phone. Just as many desktop users turn off Flash on their home computers. It’s not the designer’s place to shove Flash down your throat, particularly when there are many better alternatives.

Wouldn’t it be easier for the designer of this site to follow the simple rules of proper UI design and make a site that degrades properly on all platforms?

The really epically sad part of this is that most of the time these sites get designed with Flash for no good reason. One image fades in, or there are rollovers, something that could be easily accomplished with Javascript or some other open technology that would work everywhere.

I’m picking on Flash here, because it seems to be the most-often abused technology out there. But the same goes for Real Player, Silverlight—anything I can’t get to from a mobile phone should be avoided, or at least limited to some part of the site I don’t absolutely need to see.

Ask yourself this: for every one person who goes to your restaurant because the web site had five seconds of cool animation, how many go somewhere else because they couldn’t figure out whether or not you’re open for lunch on Saturdays?

The desktop is no longer where we get our information. I don’t care how small your business is. If you don’t have a mobile strategy going yet, be prepared to go out of business soon.

I’m a pretty hip guy when it comes to technology, but I’m not that far ahead of the curve. At this point, my iPhone is where I do 100% of my research about the restaurants, movie theaters, clothing stores that I want to visit when I’m in an unfamiliar neighborhood. The rest of the world is only a few years behind that. Keep giving everyone blank pages instead of web sites, and you might as well go back to advertising in the Yellow Pages.