Gone in a Flash

Within the past few years, the latest versions of these browser languages – specifically HTML5 and CSS3 – have rapidly extended support by naturalising features and functions that previously required third-party plugins like Flash. Essentially, common tasks like video embedding, intuitive page design, and graphical enhancements have been standardised into features. Couple these language enhancements with the maturing of open-source Javascript libraries like jQuery (an assortment of animations, effects, and other scripts), and web developers now have myriad alternatives to Flash at their disposal for creating rich web content.

This is fortunate as last month Flash’s creator, Adobe, announced it would no longer actively develop the Flash player plugin for smartphone and tablet devices and will only provide security updates and patches. The company will continue developing the Flash plugin for desktops, but when it comes to supporting mobile platforms, Adobe is getting on the HTML5 bandwagon with Apple, Google, Microsoft and RIM.  

This development (or the future lack thereof) will go some way towards setting the course of rich content development in online surveys. Making surveys work seamlessly on both desktop and mobile platforms is going to become a major concern of survey designers as increasing numbers of respondents choose to take online surveys on their web-enabled devices.

Putting aside the lack of Flash support provided by Apple’s iOS browser (which constitutes a large proportion of the US and global smartphone market), the technology has never been truly optimised and scaled for any mobile platform. Because of this, Flash itself may only be a cost-effective and viable resource for engaging surveys for another year or two.

Technology standardisation and defragmentation across platforms – desktop versus smartphone versus feature phone – coupled with the rapid smartphone adoption in developed nations will ultimately provide researchers with a more streamlined design process for multimodal surveys, and this should reduce programming costs in the industry.

The best way to ensure universal support and to eliminate device bias among respondents is to use plugin-agnostic technologies like HTML, CSS, and Javascript that are supported by nearly all browsers and devices.

HTML5 browser support – while ubiquitous in modern smartphones – is not yet prolific enough on desktop PCs and feature phones for market researchers to use the technology without putting in place safeguards similar to what a developer should do when using Flash:

1. Implement automatic browser checks at the beginning of the questionnaire that disable respondents with unsupported browsers from taking the survey.
2. If the technology from ( 1 ) is unavailable, disclose to respondents on the first page of the questionnaire which browsers and devices the survey design supports.

As the HTML5 standard is finalised and support in browsers broadens, more and more resources will continue to emerge, reproducing some of the rich and intuitive content Flash brought to the table.

Jason Cazes is the lead sales engineer for Kinesis Survey Technologies