My flash-usability research has led me to Girlzilla's Usability Testing Tips. Even if you couldn't do usability testing, if you did the first four tasks you'd probably improve your product.

1. Define Business Goals

   
   

2. Determine the User's Goals

   
   

3. Identify Your Users

   
   

4. Create Usability Tasks

   
   

If you create a list of tasks (#4) based on the user and business goals, then go through them yourself with #3, your target user, in mind you will probably quickly spot many usability problems....

Also interesting was their "Flash Usability Tips," though the reason it interested me was that it wasn't much different than most web usability lists. I know there must be usability challenges unique to Flash-- anyone want to share a few?

here's a site with a few.

I was hoping some EH readers have had thoughts along these lines...

Adam -- I would suggest taking a couple steps back from storyboarding and set the ideas, concepts, context, and flat information we want to provide. From this point build a functional flow of the information, which is essentially an outline of how the the components fit together and look at it from the perspective of a user (or better yet have a user walk-through the flow). The functional flow will help us establish logical content steps and find holes in the logical flow, which is done by having the user walk through the flow. The next step is to storyboard the functional flows where objects/images/animations are used to augment words (in some cases replace words) to help explain concepts and ideas to assist the user's understanding. The storyboarding is when we can use Flash to put very rough concept screens together or build wireframe layouts of the screens. Get user feedback at this point too before we begin digging deeper. After making the modifications to the functional model (we can return to build traditional pages from this information at a later point if we need to) and storyboard. Now we can flesh out the graphics, transitions, scripting, and animation.

Come to think of it, there's something appealing about the image of hordes of IAs and usability testers sweeping down on a mass of users, testing their products with them, and disappearing before the users know what's hit them.... :-)

As for usability, I suggest that you head to Flazoom.com and look in the Features section and the Usability section.

Oh, I'm spending quality time wiht the excellent flazoom. I'm also been turned on to quintus

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