Certified Usability Analyst course
Price: SGD 4,500.00
Duration: 7 days (9AM to 5.30PM)
Delivery format: Zoom
Other tools used: Miro, Google Docs
Link to HFI page: https://humanfactors.com/hfi-training/get_cua_certified.asp
To get certified as a usability analyst, you will need to complete all 4 modules.
Here is a short overview of all the topics:
Following is a summary of each module and my key takeaways.
1. User Experience Foundations
Instructor: Aveek Majumdar
Description from their website: This course teaches you to apply the key understandings about human vision, intellect, memory, and motor functions directly to design decisions.
Key takeaways:
- The VIMM model
- Chromatic aberration is the reason why red text on blue background looks so fuzzy and un-readable
What could be better:
- Explanation of chromatic aberration and chromostereopsis could be better. For example, how the eye perceive colour at different wavelength which causes the red text on blue background to appear like floating text and blue text on red background appear like text sinking into the background.
- Besides that, the class was great. Explanation by Aveek was very easy to understand. Overall a very good beginner course into UXUI.
2. User Centered Analysis and Conceptual Design
Instructor: Shruti Suman
Description from their website: User-centered analysis is the basis for designing software interfaces that are intuitive and easy to use. In this course, you'll learn the methods of analyzing user requirements.
Key takeaways:
- How to calculate and measure usability’s return on investment (ROI). In actual projects, we usually jump straight into the project without first making an attempt to measure ROI. It is good to know, even though most projects don’t give designers visibility to do such calculations.
- Why people think personas and useless and the right way to create personas
- Design Strategy Framework
- Task Prioritisation
What could be better:
- N.A. This is a very interesting course and Shruti explained everything very clearly. However, for beginners, the concepts might seem a little abstract. i.e. how useful a task profile table is in an actual project, how easy will it be to implement the task prioritisation.
3. The Science and Art of Effective Web and Application Design
Instructor: Masood Nasser
Description from their website: This course draws on the most up-to-date usability research and on the principles of successful visual design. You will learn how to create winning Web sites that balance user performance and visual appeal.
Key takeaways:
- The benefits of usable designs and why user-centered design should be implemented in the early stages of a project lifecycle
- Different types of navigation and the correct term to name them
- How to design for visual attention
What could be better:
- Designing for error states
- Designing for accessibility
4. Practical Usability Testing
Instructor: Masood Nasser
Description from their website: A critical component of creating a user-centered application is progressive testing. This course provides practical techniques to help you move the design into accordance with the user's needs, limitations, mental models and cognitive styles.
Key takeaways:
- Why we should test with 10 users instead of only 5.
- How to design a comparison study to rule out biasness - Within vs between subjects design.
What could be better:
- There are 2 roles in a usability testing; the facilitator and the observer. The explanation of what a facilitator does was confusing. During the activity, some members who have never done usability testing before were confused between facilitator role and observer role.
- More time could be given for the activities. It was too short and rushed and instructions given were not clear.
- From what Masood mentioned, he was only suppose to deliver Module 3: The Science and Art of Effective Web and Application Design to us; another instructor was supposed to touch on this module but that instructor was not available.
Materials
- Hardcopy books for the 4 modules were mailed to my house 1 week prior to the start of the course, together with 4 sets of activity books and 1 glossary book. Total 9 books.
- Password protected documents for each module and accompanying activity books. Total 8 documents. You will need to download an app called LockLizard in order to view these.
Hard copy (9 books)
Soft copy (8 documents)
Exam
Exam is open book and 3 hours long, with 100 MCQ questions. Upon launching the exam, connection to all other apps or web browser on your computer will be disabled. After submitting the exam, you will know your results almost immediately, at the end of the page. It looks something like this:
Here are some useful documents related to the exam which I found online:
- Exam Fact Sheet which breaks down the weightage of questions
- Sample Exam questions
Your certificate will be emailed to you in the next few weeks. For mine, I finished my exam on 31 August 2021 and received my digital certificate via email on 15 September 2021.
Here’s how my certificate looks like:
Before I end... 3 tips on how to prepare for your exam:
- Pace yourself evenly. The exam is split into 4 sections to cover all 4 modules. The weightage for the modules are different too so spend more time on the higher weightage ones.
- Understand the content. For my case, only about 10% of the questions comes from the textbooks. All others are application questions and the answers cannot be found from the books.
- Prepare your own glossary. For me, I wrote down the key concept and the page number to that concept, just as a reminder for me, in case I needed to quickly reference something. 3 hours is not enough to flip through every single book.
If you have any questions about the course, you can DM me on Instagram @ux.fionalim.
