Abstract
Usability is an important and well recognized consideration within the design process in fields such as industrial design and human factors but until recently has received more limited attention within engineering. The topic of usability is often relegated to the senior capstone design project where the project topic might not be amenable to a broad in depth discussion of the topic. This paper emphasizes the need to include usability in lower level design courses and suggests possible methods for including the topic in both lecture and project based design courses without substantially altering the existing overall course objectives.