A Critique of We Choose the Moon, an Interactive Website About the Apollo 11 Mission

The “We Choose the Moon” website was very interesting and educational in my perspective. It was very easy to navigate and the experience was widely the same over every browser except Firefox where I had to download Flash in order to view the site. There was just one major problem with the site, however. The site was completely dependent on Flash which is an add-on, meaning that a user basically could not even access the site without having Flash running. For desktop browsers this is almost a nonissue since most have no problems running Flash, but for mobile the site is not viewable since mobile browsers cannot run Flash.

I feel like the site should not have this large of a dependency on Flash. It completely cuts out mobile users which are a huge and ever growing audience.

The site should have been made using more HTML and CSS which are languages that can be viewed by any browser. Even if the majority of the site was Flash dependent, any educational information including pictures, mission transmissions, or videos should have been made available to access without the use of Flash so that mobile users could at least learn about the Apollo 11 mission.

Another problem that stemmed from the Flash dependency was that I could not inspect the element at all. Since my knowledge of web programming is somewhat minimal at this point, I could not see how the developers implemented code, assuming there is some HTML code used, and how Flash was used in supplementing the code.

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Flash was the Achilles’ heel of this site. Even though the Flash dependency is the site’s biggest weakness, Flash is also what makes it unique and fun to use. ‘The animations of the stages is a really awesome effect and lets the user see exactly how the mission was accomplished. The Mission ‘Tracker bar was a good addition for people who want to know the specific metrics of the mission since it shows various measurements at each stage of the mission.

Being able to change the view of the spacecraft made me feel like I was actually viewing a 3D replica of the spacecraft. Another good touch was the Mission ‘Transmission box. It showed all transmissions between the ground and capsule in a chronological order for each stage. Flash definitely made all of these cool features work better than what they normally would on regular HTML and CSS. Overall, this site was very cool and fun to use even though it was entirely dependent on Flash. Flash created the biggest problems the site contained but also made the neat parts possible. If it lessened its dependence on Flash just a little, the site would be a great resource for anyone wanting to learn about the Apollo 11 mission.