Susan Fowler

Susan Fowler currently teaches human-computer interaction online at Fairleigh Dickinson University and also has been teaching a Websites 101 class for small business owners on Staten Island for five years. Susan was a usability engineer at Telcordia Technologies (now iconectiv) and an automated usability test analyst for Keynote Systems.

With Victor Stanwick, Susan is author of three books on software design: The GUI Style Guide, GUI Design Handbook, and Web Application Design Handbook.

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Teaching User-Centered Design to People Who Aren't Interested

At Fairleigh Dickinson University, Susan has been teaching a human-computer interaction class to IT and cybersecurity undergraduates, for whom the class is just a peculiar required course. She also taught "Websites 101," which was advertised as a way to set up a free website, to small business owners on Staten Island. However, in both cases, the participants got more than they bargained for.

The college students learn about affordances, signifiers, conceptual models, and gulfs of evaluation and execution ‐ in other words, why simple things in their environments don’t work the way they're supposed to.

The small business owners learned how physiology trumps aesthetics and how Jacob Nielsen's "10 Usability Heuristics for User Interface Design" play out in real life.

In this session, you’ll learn how to explain user-centered design issues to co-workers and supervisors who are unfamiliar with or uninterested in the topic ‐ until you show them what it means for their products and services.