Like everything else in our keep-up-with-the-Joneses culture, design follows a herd mentality. So, someone created the first Flash splash page back in about 1999 — and suddenly everybody had to have one. Some companies spent a bundle on them, only to find out that most users immediately looked for the “Skip Intro” button. (Remember when the first ones came out, and there was no “skip intro” button? Infuriating.)
Finally (for many sites), the splash has been replaced by the Flash Home Page: tone words zooming in and out, fading slideshows, scrolling news in the tiniest font possible. It’s all very popular right now, and most of these pages come off like a three-ring circus. (Probably a good design concept for Barnum & Bailey’s Web site, come to think of it, but maybe not so good for the rest of us.) For those designers who consider these things, it’s like a third dimension in design: I can cram more content in without over-cluttering the page! For the rest of the design world, it’s because “everybody else is doing it.”
The problem is, many users don’t like motion on the page, unless they initiated it. They like rollovers and other visual cues that help them find content or services; but when they’re focused in on something, which is almost all the time, they report that the extra motion is distracting.
This’ll change. Even now, we’re starting to see simpler home pages, with the widgets reduced in proportion to static content and useful navigation. And that’s a good thing.
