Certified User Experience Professional (CUEP) Training Program
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Mission Statement & Promised Outcomes for CUEP
Developing products so that they can be used effectively, and users are satisfied with using them, just makes sense. But how can you be sure that the products you develop are usable, especially as users and the products themselves are constantly changing? You can conduct surveys, focus groups, look at various quantitative measurements from usage logs or help desk transactions, but until you watch real users perform real tasks in real situations with the products, you just don’t have an accurate picture.
One model for conducting usability evaluations is to hire outside firms to carry out what are often very thorough but also very expensive tests. In fact, because they tend to be expensive, organizations often only purchase one round of testing that generally comes late in the process. But as recent research has shown us (Molich, 2003; Becker, 2004), usability testing is not especially effective when it is employed as a single instance and/or late in the production cycle. Even if legitimate problems are discovered, it is often too late to do anything about them, at least until version 2.0.
Rather, usability evaluation is at its best when it comes early and often. It isn’t necessary that an experienced outside group of “hired guns” do the testing. If organizations are committed to testing early and often, if they make sure to test real users performing real tasks in real situations, then any number of professionals in that organization, with the right focused training, can generate effective usability evaluations. In fact, if marketing professionals, web developers, programmers, project managers, and any number of other staff closely associated with a product’s development and maintenance are trained and then made responsible for implementing internal usability testing, our research tells us that changes they uncover about usability issues regarding a product will be more likely to be implemented, they will happen faster, and they will occur throughout the process iteratively, insuring in the long run a more usable product. And this always translates into cost savings. Carol Barnum, Jakob Nielsen…the list goes on. Many, many experts tell us that usable products are just more preferred, and that users return to use them again and again, and they also tell others about them who, in turn, use them.
So many barriers have stood in the way of organizations looking to train their professionals to conduct rigorous, helpful usability evaluations of their products. Time is one. It is difficult for professionals to give up an entire semester of work to taking a usability testing course. Also such courses are rarely available, especially near where organizations are located.
But the Certified User Experience Professional (CUEP) Course offered by Texas Tech University has been designed so that professionals and organizations can overcome these barriers. Taking advantage of Tech’s state of the art usability research lab, and its internationally-recognized distance education program, the CUEP is an intensive, hands-on course. Classes are small, no more than 10 students, and everyone enrolled is after the same skills. They are working professionals who want to be able to learn the techniques and methods necessary to conduct rigorous user experience evaluations the moment they return to their work. And after some initial pre-readings available online, and three full days of workshop training that requires them to put into practice a wide variety of industry standard approaches to usability testing, including designing, implementing, and evaluating a usability test of an actual product and its users, CUEP students will have the training to do just that.
Promised CUEP Outcomes
After completing the course, here’s what you’ll know or be able to do:
- User profiling—you’ll learn how users mentally model the products they use, and through techniques such as site visits and cognitive walkthroughs you’ll learn how to develop essential profiles that will be used to recruit representative users for testing.
- Task analysis—you’ll discover through the techniques above as well as others what tasks users typically perform when using products, and a selection of these tasks will be performed during testing.
- MEELS—you’ll learn what usability means and how to configure every evaluation you perform to make sure that you are evaluating correctly the memorability, error rates, efficiency, learnability, and overall satisfaction (MEELS) of a product.
- Prototyping & Iterative Testing—you just don’t have to evaluate the usability of a finished product. We’ll teach you how to create and conduct evaluations for different levels of a product’s fidelity, including paper prototyping (low level fidelity) and wireframe prototyping (medium level fidelity), insuring that you can and will conduct iterative, ongoing testing of products.
- Test Facilitation—you’ll learn Think Aloud Protocol (TAP), an ideal tool for getting users to tell you what they’re thinking as they use the product. Other similar methods, such as co-discovery, heuristic evaluation, and retrospective recall, will also be covered and practiced. In addition, you’ll also learn the do’s and don’ts of effective test facilitation.
- Test Planning—you’ll learn how to construct a usability test plan, including creating pre-screening questionnaires, recruiting users and handling their private data, aligning test goals with organization and user goals, developing realistic user scenarios, writing scripts for facilitating testing, developing observation logs for gathering data, and creating post-test surveys to gather additional information.
- AV Equipment and Software—although your training will take place in a state of the art lab that has literally all of the “bells and whistles,” you cannot always have access to such facilities, nor do you need them. We’ll walk you through a variety of options regarding technology to facilitate your testing, and you’ll get experience with different audio/video setups as well as Morae, which is a widely used usability testing software.
- Data Analysis and Reporting—it isn’t just important to conduct valid testing. You also have to analyze it correctly, and then report it effectively, and persuasively. We’ll teach you affinity diagramming among other qualitative and also quantitative analytical methods. Finally, we’ll introduce you to the ISO standard for reporting usability testing, offering examples and an outline of how to conduct this kind of formal report as well as more informal internal reports meant to bring results back quickly to product development teams and managers so that they are clear and convincing.
This isn’t a lecture course. You will hit the ground running, getting your hands on equipment from day one, hour one. We believe the best way to guarantee that you’ll be able to implement what you learn in the course is if you did it already in the course.
Of course, we just want cut you loose after you return to work. You will always be able to login to the online CUEP, asking questions of our staff or consulting the CUEP discussion forum to share experiences and ideas with others like you that have taken the course and are working to implement effective usability evaluations of products.
The CUEP is truly the first course of its kind dedicated to providing intensive, hands-on training that focuses on practical concerns for those interested in learning how to be effective user experience professionals.