| By Yakov Fain | Article Rating: |
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| February 16, 2008 01:15 PM EST | Reads: |
7,847 |
OK, car manufactures go Flex. Will they lose or gain customers after that?
Car
manufacturers want to have fancy consumer sites. It’s a RIA world, and
having interactive Web sites should bring more people to car
dealerships. Bikers to want to see nice looking Web sites. Check out
Harley-Davidson’s Web site: http://www.harley-davidson.com
. While most of Harley’s site is done in DHTML, go to Motorcycles menu,
pick a model, get some pop-corn and enjoy the show. That piece was
done in Flash. Isn’t it nice?
Let’s take another site for Mini cars: http://www.miniusa.com , which was also build in Flash and is delivered by Flash Player. It’s also not bad.
You can spot a weird-looking car on the roads. It's called Scion. Their Web site looks a lot better than the car itself, isn't it?
A recent addition to the RIA collection is UK’s Volkswagen. This one was done in Flex and was also delivered by Flash Player: http://www.volkswagen.co.uk/
. Excellent artwork – just take a look at how you can customize the
wheels or the exterior paint color. Isn’t it something? But something
else did not look right… The site was a bit slow, and I was on a fast 30 mbps connection. This got me thinking – the majority of the
population will be connecting to this Volkswagen’s site via a lot
slower connection lines. What their experience would be?
I
decided to make an experiment. I have my cell phone with me that I can
also use as a modem via the USB port of my laptop. Luckily, I was in
the area of slow connection - www.speedtest.net reported the download speed of only 180kbps. Now we are talking! Welcome to the real world.
I
went to this Volkswagen’s Web site and started to wait. During the
first minute nothing happened –a white screen with a wait cursor. To
make the long story short, I had to wait two minutes and forty five
seconds(!) till I was able to use the site. Don’t you this it’s a little
too much?
I’d guess that about 25% of people who visit Volkswagen
are impulse buyers. They did not open this site because they were
specifically interested in buying Volkswagen. After one minute wait,
they’ll abandon this site and go to their competitors. Is Volkswagen
ready to lose these customers just because they were using cool Flex
technology? I don’t think so.
Each RIA project has at least two groups of people involved – designers/artists, and people who know how to program.I know this first hand, because I currently work on a Flex project for yet another large car manufacturer. These applications have a lot of art. Can’t change it, they (creative people) know how to sell. Fine, but it’s good to have people who know how to efficiently program rich Internet applications. In case of Volkswagen, my hat off to creative people and my boo to their application programmers.
I’m afraid that poorly programmed RIA will hurt Flex.
Hey,
Volkswagen, do some stress testing and optimize your web site!
Published February 16, 2008 Reads 7,847
Copyright © 2008 SYS-CON Media, Inc. — All Rights Reserved.
Syndicated stories and blog feeds, all rights reserved by the author.
More Stories By Yakov Fain
Yakov Fain is a Managing Director of Farata Systems, consulting, training and product company. He has authored several Java books, dozens of technical articles. SYS-CON Books released his latest co-authored book , Rich Internet Applications with Adobe Flex and Java: Secrets of the Masters in Spring 2007. Sun Microsystems has nominated and awarded Yakov with the title Java Champion. He leads the Princeton Java Users Group. He is an Adobe Certified Flex Instructor. Currently Yakov works on the book for O'Reilly "Enterprise Application Development with Flex". He twits at twitter.com/yfain.
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gerrymclarnon 04/03/08 06:10:30 AM EDT | |||
I'll have to take your word for the slow connection, my experience of the site is that it is slick and fast. BTW how many people buy a car on impulse via a website? |
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sc 02/25/08 12:56:00 PM EST | |||
I'm sure the testers can't think of all combinations and permutations, but they could do better. A simple performance test is one. The other is the requirement for Flash. I've been browsing quite a number of car sites lately as I'm in the market, and I've been browsing with my new toy, my ipod touch. Surprise! Flash isn't supported in the touch, so I move on to the next car manufacturer (granted I blame Apple for not supporting Flash). Luckily, at www.thesmart.ca I'm able to build the car I want on my touch and show it to my spouse. smart is a little smarter than vw it seems. |
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