I've got another popular company that is using Flex for an e-commerce solution today, as a follow up to my previous post about Flexand Flashbased e-commerce sites. The Sony Ericsson website uses a Flex based interface to display and filter cell phones for potential customers.

Filtering results and drilling down into products seems to be a category that developers feel Flex and Flash are really good at. Nike uses a Flash RIA for similar functionality. Not surprising: Flash and Flex applications look really great, with awesome transitions, fades and other subtleties, and can accomplish the task without reloading data or the webpage. This makes for a much improved user experience than a regular HTML website (and we know that improved experiences make for higher conversion rates).
One of the things that I don't like about the Sony store is the fact that a dialog window pops up when they filter results. The checkbox to "Don't show this dialog again" doesn't seem to work for me, so it keeps popping up over and over again. I also don't like the fact that the Read More link from a phone takes me to an HTML page, because when I hit the back button I'm not sent to the exact screen that I was at before. I'm at the main store page, not the specific phone page I was at. (This could be fixed by changing the URL when I click on an item in the store, like Yahoo does with Maps).
| Attachment | Size |
|---|---|
| Sony-Ericsson-Flex.png | 108.52 KB |
Comments
Nice to see public facing
Nice to see public facing Flex sites--but that one is not exactly stellar. Lots of flashing and rought edges. I wonder what the reason for this is: developer/client doesn't care... it was a giant chore to get that last 10% cleaned up... ?
I really do want to see a few more killer Flex apps though.
Yes, I agree with you...
Yes, I agree with you... There are a lot of rough edges in this application, and I'm not sure of the reason, whether or not they didn't have enough time to clean it up, if this is a first itteration of many etc...
There are a lot of great Flex applications already out there, and even more Flash applications. It will take time for Flex applications to come out - the player penetration rates are still too low for many companies to invest in Flex just yet, but as with Flash 8 and the online video explosion, I'm sure we'll see a ton of great new Flex applications in a very short while.
Mike
where is the link to go to
where is the link to go to this site, so that I can check this app...