According to Nick Myers, working in Fireworks throughout the design process has many benefits:

-You use one tool for both interaction design and visual design

- It encourages teams to be more collaborative as work is passed back and forth between the different people involved

- You can work much faster as you don't have to recreate things or check work against each other's files

- It reduces mistakes as you don't manage multiple versions of files

In usability tests, we can learn much more from people that are motivated to carry out the tasks than from people that go though the tasks in a mechanical way without understanding what they are doing or why. Demographic, such as age, gender and occupation, might be helpful in narrowing down potential participants. But they don't say anything about peoples' motivation. In order to recruit motivated people, we should focus more on peoples' interests in the subject.

The tool has many of the features you would expect from a decent prototyping tool. But unfortunately, it lacks the ability to work with even basic interactivity, such as creating interlinked pages

A related study in the Netherlands found that this was the case for half of the products returned by Dutch people.

Apparently, Americans aren't as bright as the Dutch people ;)

They found that:

- There doesn't seem to be much consistency across travel site in how they locate their login and whether they use a login form or a login link

- When looking for the login, user seemed to first look for a pair of text fields. If they couldn't find it, they would start looking for a link.

- The location and type of login made no discernable difference.

- Users had trouble when the login feature wasn't visually distinct from the rest of the page

- If two text fields were located close to each other, some users would mistake them for the login form

- Once logged in, a pattern that worked well was to replace the login feature with the user's name and a logout link.

- Users had strong expectations about when the login features should appear. The most successful approach was to give users the option when it was beneficial to them.

The feature list is quite amazing: drag-and-drop widgets, automatic navigation, and potent specification and collaboration tools with annotations, discussions, to-do lists and what have we.

The only downside is that the tool is somewhat slow to work with compared with an off-line tool.

According to Alexa, creating a basic click-through prototype in Flash takes the same time and effort as with other popular prototyping tools, while the flexibility and potential for extending the prototype is far greater in Flash.

But if you really want an objective decision criterion, follow the platform conventions. If you users are primarily Windows users, put Cancel last. If your users are primarily Mac users, put Cancel first.

If Windows users equals Mac users, flip a coin.

- Not conducting any customer research
- Making decisions based on made-up user profiles
- Conducting the wrong type of research
- Using predefined tasks in usability tests
- Not inviting stakeholders to attend usability tests
- Not prioritizing findings from usability tests
- Not relating research to business objectives
- Missing the larger strategic picture

Hear the rest of the Web design tutorial rap featuring Poetic Prophet (AKA The SEO Rapper)...