About Susan

Susan Fowler is a principal of FAST Consulting and the co-author, with Victor Stanwick of The GUI Style Guide, The GUI Design Handbook, and Web Application Design Handbook from Morgan-Kaufmann Publishers. In addition to teaching technical communication, Susan does usability testing and consulting.

STC UUX Community Newsletter
Usability Interface

Interview with Susan Fowler

Usability Interface: What was your occupation before you became a published author?

Fowler: When I came to New York City after graduating from the University of Hartford, I received two consecutive jobs as an editor:

On Real Story, a confession magazine (uh-huh), I was an assistant editor for two years and reviewed the unsolicited stories—none of which we ever bought.

On Lab Animal magazine, I was the editor-in-chief, a major jump in responsibility due to the fact that no one else in the country wanted the job. However, I had a mission—to help laboratory animals—that unexpectedly dovetailed with the readers’ missions. It turned out that the lab-animal facility managers and technicians who read the magazine felt strongly about the welfare of their rats, mice, and dogs and did their best to reduce the animals’ pain and suffering. But they weren’t allowed to talk about it—feelings weren’t “scientific.”

But then I published an interview with animal-rights activist Henry Spira in the magazine, and it opened up the conversation. Henry had a very commonsense approach to animal rights that he summed up as “the three Rs”: refine, reduce, and replace. Refine tests so that you get better information; reduce pain and suffering; and replace animal tests with test-tube and Petri-dish tests whenever possible. Twenty years later, Lab Animal readers have demonstrably reduced animal pain and suffering; unfortunately, though, they haven’t yet put themselves out of business.

After Lab Animal, I became a technical writer and trainer for a small software company, and I’ve been in the software field ever since.

Usability Interface: What was your first book, and what motivated you to write it?

Fowler: Our first book was The GUI Style Guide from Academic Press (1994). The motivation was actually an editor—a friend who had been working at ACM’s Computing Reviews and had just gotten a job in book publishing—who asked me if I wanted to write a book. I had always expected to write a book someday, although I thought it would be a novel or some new journalism. But no.

I still write short nonfiction pieces from time to time. You can see an example, “Crab Angels at Work.”

Usability Interface: What inspires you to write the kind of books you do?

Fowler: There are two reasons I write these books (I write and Victor does the artwork and the technical bits). The first reason is simply that I like doing the research, puzzling out answers to the questions that come up in design meetings. Software in particular is a good source of questions because it can mimic anything that you can project onto a flat surface (a screen). You use the same machine to pay bills, write a manual, or play Myst. Most machines are more constrained—you can’t use a car to calculate the amortization for a new mortgage, for example. Designing an application for this blank slate is really very difficult. We’ve gotten used to it, though, so we usually don’t notice how hard it is and how much prior work we’re building on.

The second reason is that I noticed you could argue a point for hours and no one would accept it, but if you showed them that it was in print, they’d all shut up. So I figured I’d write a book and win my arguments that way.

Usability Interface: What do you like most and least about the publishing business?

Fowler: If you want to know what it’s like to write and publish a book, see the animation that Victor did for Web Application Design’s book party on our home page. Look for “Virtual book party!” near the middle of the page. The best part of writing a book is finishing it. The worst part is when someone says that the book is too easy to read, so it can’t be that good. This is something that technical writers come across all the time—people mistake simple text for simple ideas and difficult text for difficult ideas. However, professional technical writers (in fact, good writers everywhere) know that making something easy to understand is the hardest thing on earth.

Usability Interface: For the 2004 UPA conference you presented “Yeah, I hear you: Why aren’t there more sounds and graphics in our applications?” Certainly it’s a direction that applications will have to take. How did it turn out?

Fowler: When Alice Preston and I proposed the workshop, we expected to collect information about using sound in interfaces and then create a set of guidelines. Instead, the workshop members convinced us that it was far too early for guidelines and that trying to come up with rules at this point would cut off experimentation and constrain, rather than expand, our knowledge.

University of Nebraska professor John Flowers, one of the workshop members, added that you can’t pick the right sounds without first looking at the task. A sound environment for monitoring anesthesia in patients will be very different from an auditory display of rain or snow data.

Instead of trying to come up with guidelines, we described the knowledge dissemination “iceberg”:

• Initially, academics do research and publish their results in peer-reviewed journals.
• Other researchers start writing literature reviews, summarizing and comparing research areas.
• Professors such as Ben Shneiderman begin to publish instructional digests for graduate students, who then do more research.
• Articles start to appear in professional journals and trade magazines.
• Authors write trade books on the topic: How to Create Sound User Interfaces, SUI Design Handbook, SUI Bloopers, etc.
• Sound Interfaces for Dummies appears.

Sound interface design is still only at the top of the iceberg, no lower than number 2. A possible exception is Susan Weinschenk and Dean Barker’s Designing Effective Speech Interfaces (New York, John Wiley & Sons, Feb. 2000), but that book covers only verbal interfaces, not non-speech sound.

Usability Interface: What books, projects, hopes, and wishes do you have for 2005?

Fowler: Obviously, we have to start working on the SUI Design Handbook! And your readers need to start thinking about the sound and visualization tools their organizations will need to make sense of fifty years’ worth of data. Hint: About half of Web Application Design Handbook addresses visualization: for example, rules of thumb, definitions, and design help for graphs, diagrams, and maps.

Resources

Information about Henry Spira is found at www.animalsagenda.org/articledetail.asp?Menu=News&NewsID=36 and www.animalpeoplenews.org/98/8/henry.html

Susan Weinschenk and Dean Barker’s “Designing Effective Speech Interfaces” is available on Amazon.com

More information about sonification is available on Susan's Fast Consulting Web site