User Experience Certification

This section of the syllabus covers the following areas:

• Articulate the importance of taking the users’ perspective.
• Paraphrase the key principles of user centred design.
• Recall ISO9241 as an important standard in the field of usability.
• Have an understanding of different user perspectives and goals for using a system
• Recall the difference between usability and user experience.
• Recall the difference between usability and user acceptance testing.
• Summarise the benefits or inclusive design.

This section of the syllabus covers the following areas:

• State the components of the context of use.
• Identify the potential users of the system.
• Plan site visits to end users to understand the context of use.
• Recognise good and poor questions to ask in user interviews.
• Describe the kinds of data that should be collected during a site visit to users.
• Interpret the data from a site visit in ways that can be used to develop a shared knowledge of the context of use.
• State the difference between observation and interpretation.
• List discount usability research techniques that can be used to understand the context of use, such as diary studies.
• State the key principles of contextual inquiry.
• Define affinity diagramming.
• Choose the appropriate research method to understand the context of use.
• Demonstrate the difference between opinion-based and behaviour based research methods.
• Recognise that requirements gathering and conceptual design should be truly inclusive.

• Illustrate the specific users of the system.
• Write descriptions of users that can be used for design.
• Explain the rationale for focussing on user needs.
• Interpret key user needs.
• Explain that including too many choices in a user interface increases the cognitive load on users.
• State the elements of a user story.

• Define usability.
• Illustrate how the definition of usability can be used to construct measures of usability.
• Demonstrate how to choose between good and poor design ideas by using behavioural data.
• Illustrate the role design experiments play in validated learning.
• Identify the strengths and weaknesses of multivariate testing as a method for choosing between design alternatives.
• Explain the value of iterative design.
• Recall that good and bad user experiences have an emotional reaction on users.

This section of the syllabus covers the following areas:

• Recognise the way information flows between a person and a product or service.
• Choose appropriate schemes for classifying and organising information.
• Organise, structure and label content, functions and features.
• Describe the steps in carrying out an open and a closed card sort.
• Compare and contrast an implementation model, a mental model and a conceptual model
• State the concept of affordance.

• Describe different user interface design patterns.
• Choose the correct interactive control in a user interface design.
• Describe how the choice of user interface control has an impact on the time it takes users to achieve their goals.
• Define the concept of progressive disclosure.
• State the difference between interaction design and information architecture.
• Explain why user interface consistency is an important design principle.
• State the importance of focussing on the user’s tasks when designing the flow of a user interface.

This section of the syllabus covers the following areas:

• List fundamental principles of visual design.
• Identify good and poor page layouts.
• Define eye tracking as a research methodology and recall key insights from eye tracking research.
• Describe the advantages and disadvantages of using metaphorical representations in visual design.

This section of the syllabus covers the following areas:

• Choose between different types of prototype, for example paper and electronic, and recall the merits of each.
• Recognise the appropriate type of prototype for the phase of design.
• Describe the differences between prototypes and sketches.
• Recognise the importance of identifying multiple different design solutions before deciding on a specific design solution.
• Sketch paper prototypes.

• Recall Nielsen’s Usability Heuristics and have an awareness of other usability principles.
• State the different kinds of usability evaluation.
• Plan usability evaluations to test design hypotheses.
• Record the data from usability evaluations.
• Interpret the data from usability tests to distinguish high and low severity usability problems.
• Moderate a usability test.
• State the difference between a usability inspection and a usability test.
• Choose between good and poor tasks for a usability test.
• State the difference between observation and interpretation.
• Identify W3C’s Web Content Accessibility Guidelines as an important standard in the field of web accessibility

This is the full text of the syllabus for the BCS Foundation Certificate in User Experience. This document is © BCS. You can get the most up-to-date version of the syllabus from the BCS web site by using this link: http://certifications.bcs.org/upload/pdf/swt-foundation-ux-syllabus.pdf

Here's some revision tips if you're about to take the exam. You can download the syllabus from the BCS web site: http://certifications.bcs.org/upload/pdf/swt-foundation-ux-glossary.pdf

This lecture aims to answer some common questions, like:

• Can I sit the exam without attending a training course?
• How do I take the exam?
• How much does it cost?
• What if I fail?
• English is not my first language, is extra time allowed?
• When do I receive my results?

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