This is was once cutting edge Flash work. Scary.

Jakob Nielsen probably thought it was 99 percent bad.

I’ve been receiving inquiries about posting jobs here. Because of this, I’ll be posting new opportunities every Monday. Some of them aren’t pure User Experience, but they do have some kind of User Experience or SharePoint slant to them. If you see anything here, or are looking for a job, send me your resume at jobs@usabilitycounts.com.

Senior Level Flex Developer, Southern California

The opportunity

A technology product and services company is looking for a Flex Developer  with two years experience to join their User Experience team. The company is international in scope and a leader in their field, and their client list includes Fortune 500 companies that use their award winning, enterprise-level products and solutions. They may consider the right candidate if they have experience in a J2EE environment and are looking to expand their skill set.

The position is either a full time or contract.

Requirements

• Rich Internet Application (RIA) development experience, preferably with AJAX or Adobe Flash
• Experience with the Adobe Flex development environment
• Advanced HTML and CSS skills
• ActionScript skills
• JavaScript skills

Pluses

Background

• Good communication skills
• Well versed at working with User Experience teams and processes
• Proven track record of delivering innovative solutions

Pay Range

Mini Golf is exactly as it sounds — a miniature golf course played through a Adobe Flash application right there on MySpace. It sounds like a nifty idea, but there have been a fare number of Flash applications that have done the same thing, some of them better with a high quality, and this one asks you to buy the gold version the page.

It’s fun, but tough. The one usability issue I have is there is no way to preview the complete hole (move the cursor around) to see where you have to shoot.

The other issue: it’s a social networking site. You would think a ranking system would be in place, versus your friends and everyone on MySpace. But alas, it’s a one player game, essentially.

Application rating (1 to 5, 5 being highest):

• Usefulness: 2
• Usability: 2
• Fun Factor: 4
• Stability: 5
• Monetization Opportunities: 4

The real goal of MySpace opening up their site to external applications is so developers will extend the profiles and give the end users more functionality to view their MySpace content. Flash Photo Viewer is a good example at an attempt to extend the functionality.

Flash Photo Viewer is exactly what it’s titled: an application built in Flash that loads on your photos on your home page, profile and canvas so you can view all your photos in a scrollable list, and see a larger version of a photo in the primary window. Click on that photo, and a new window displays the full version of the photo. While you view the profile or home page, the viewer goes into slideshow mode.

The application isn’t very complex, but it doesn’t have to be — it does exactly what it advertises.

The application design has a few issues though. It looks the the developer didn’t build separate Flash applications for the User Home Page, User Profile and Canvas, so the size of the slideshow controls is painfully small on the profile and home page. Additionally, the interface is clunky, not polished.

Application rating (1 to 5, 5 being highest):

• Usefulness: 4
• Usability: 3
• Fun Factor: 4
• Stability: 4
• Monetization Opportunities: 3

Use Rich Media With A Purpose

This is not a criticism — this is actually a compliment. Ted.com does an amazing job making Flash relevant with this page design, using large images are very prominent business and social leaders to create a very visual experience. Select an option on the left (say, technology), and the page reshuffles like a tag cloud to present new speakers. They could have built this using DHTML — the page still would have been fairly heavy — but it’s really aimed at an audience that already has a fat pipe to serve up this content.

Content can be ordered and sized by different faceted filters (woo hoo!), and if the visualization mode is too much for you, you can resort to a list view (how Web 1.0). You can even view the number of comments and times each was emailed to friends.

Another tip: it would be even cooler if the boxes could be dragged around and re-ordered to see certain topics large.

Flash is overused, but this is a good article on the best uses of Flash. Some of the points are pretty much, “duh.”

I’m going to start reviewing the applications of MySpace I come across that I think have some value. Most of them have a serious fun factor — did you really think any of them were going to be actually useful — but there are a few of them that truly extend the profile.

Not all applications are about usefulness: Pokey is this great little animation of your own little pet on your home page. The dog fetches frisbies, digs up bones, needs to eat. There’s a definate fun factor here, and the animation is one of the best I have seen for a while.

Don’t pay enough attention, the dog barks. Go away for a long time, the dog sleeps. Feed the dog, and a bag of dog food appears (I hope they are charging Science Diet for showing the bag and logo). It’s cute, but I don’t think it has a ton of lasting power.

It’s easy and fun to use, but there are no viral functions to the application — it just seems people just add the application through the application gallery, and you would think they could use the dog to send messages.

There are no monetization applications for this now. We’ll see where it goes.

Application rating (1 to 5, 5 being highest):

• Usefulness: 1
• Usability: 5
• Fun Factor: 5
• Stability: 2
• Monetization Opportunities: 1

I work with a lot of rich media developers at my current position, and we’ve been trying to make the journey to SilverLight, a new technology by Microsoft (and a competitor of Flash). It does some really cool things (the whole non-compiled thing will be a plus once they work out some of the details.

I’m not saying it’s a me-too technology — there are some very obvious advantages to it, beginning with standardizing on a programming language people actually use instead of something specialized like ActionScript, but we’ve had the hardest time adjusting to the workflow, and a lot of designers are afraid of this much like they are afraid of Flash CS3 Professional because it is such an adjustment. It was hard enough just moving over to the whole motion graphics world, and now many designers and developers are expected to relearn the application to a certain extent.

To the person who applies for this job, please remember how your job is better adoption in following ways:

• It’s not enough just to have timelines — the application really should be easy to use for designers because they are not programmers
• Make some of the interactions easier to explain like, “how do you make a button so it has the multiple states”, maybe even adding wizards like, “create a new button”
• Produce a product that can actually align text better (text alignment should be one of those 1.0 items, not on the 3.0 product list)
• Cater to the designers that ditched Flash when it moved to Actionscript 2 to Actionscript 3
• Most of all, it’s about user adoption and talking to your audience — if you don’t do that, no one will use it