So I’m in the market for a new car, or rather I will be in a couple of months.  So far my research has been purely online, going back and forth between review sites and the sites of auto manufacturers.  Last on my list of companies to check out is Scion.  Like many a flashy website, Scion’s page seems to be rendered almost entirely in flash (though it’s hard to tell because I never even manage to get that far with it).  The flash control loads all it’s data, then hangs on “Initializing” at 80%.

Figuring it could just be a problem with the Firefox install on my Ubuntu installation, I booted up Opera to see if it would render any better.  Nope.  In fact, even worse, it just loads a blank page.  Painfully, I booted into my Windows VM and tried to load it in Firefox there.  I was running on battery power, which, while running the VM, will bring the machine to a crawl.

Opening the Scion website, it graciously informed me that I didn’t have the Flash player; not suprising considering I rarely use the browser in my Virtual Machine, let alone a Flash enabled site.  I clicked the link to install the plugin; broken link.  Scion never got the memo that Macromedia was bought out by Adobe, hence the link to a Macromedia page would do no good.

I manually installed the Flash player, and attempted to reload the Scion website.  Finally the website displayed.

Scion violated several rules of usability with their site:

1. Cross platform capability.  I realize that Opera/Linux is kind of a niche market, but there are really only three major platforms to work with, it’s not that hard to test all of them.
2. Check your links.  The Adobe/Macromedia acquisition happened months ago.  If you’re going to require users of your site to use Flash, make sure the installation link is right.
3. Requiring Flash.  Rich media is nice, but there are other ways to do it, and you should always have an alternative to your rich media version, especially in a market as broad as autos.  Alienating a user through a hard to use website probably isn’t the best idea.

For what it’s worth the rest of the site wasn’t much better after I loaded the Flash.  In fact, the cars didn’t look that good either.