Doof is an interesting web service that takes all of those fun flash games that we have grown to love and wraps it snugly into a social network. Not a bad plan when you notice the sheer number of games they have, the ability to compete against people across the world, and a treasure trove of whiz bang features to keep you busy even when you aren’t playing.

Doof would be almost perfect, except it is missing one crucial element necessary for a mini-games site to be successful, accessibility.

Doof

What can you do in Doof? Almost everything. You can watch videos, upload your Facebook photo album, send gifts, customize your page and yes, even play games. All of this looks really good within their all Flash interface. Unfortunately, that interface is also the crux of the problem with the site. When compared to other mini-game sites, you’ll notice Doof runs very slowly.

With a few windows open or a slow connection even games like Snake will have hiccups. All SEO aside, they might do well to create a light version of the site for people with slow connections. It would be great to be able to have someplace to go when I only want access to the games and some limited feature set.

Doof’s platform feel is both it’s greatest strength and a major weakness. There is so much to do that sometimes you are distracted from the games. The worst of these moments was when I was trying to play Pong and an advertisement for a featured game (that was not Pong) popped onto my screen. Sometimes, all I really want to do is waste some time. The sheer scope of Doof makes that difficult.

If you look at similar sites like Addicting Games, you’ll notice that it is not only much faster than Doof but also the time between getting to the site and playing your first game is substantially smaller. Designing in all Flash when HTML and Javascript might have done the trick always creates usability overhead.

As a community, Doof is great. Once you get involved, they provide every opportunity to interact with other site members. They also allow you to have control over how the UI is arranged and what features you want in front of you using their Dooflets functionality. Other game sites could really take a page out of their book as far as usability is concerned.

Web 2.0 Roundup

All my little gripes aside, I really liked Doof. I do think that in order for them to grow they will need some kind of HTML version of their site. Advertisers will want to be able to take metrics that Flash might not be able to provide and selling credits by itself usually does not scale very well (there are too many free mini-game sites available). All in all Doof is a great site to go to kill a little time, just make sure you have all your tabs closed and a fast Internet connection.

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