How easy/difficult is the exam. Do the HFI course materials suffice to take you through?

Pls advice

Congratulations for passing the exam. I am also interested giving an exam but not able to find out study material as HFI gives it out at a time of course. I am not attending any course, can you please let me know where I will get handbooks?

Thanks & Congratulations again
Prasad

Regards,
Smac

Those books aren’t sold separately and you won’t find them in any digital format. Sorry to disappoint you but I think you’re just going to have to attend the rest of the courses in order to get the materials.

I did the “Science and art of effective web design” course in Jan in bangalore.

I want to give the CUA exams in march, but i dont know where to find books for the other 3 courses.

Could u guide me on that?I’d appreciate.

Thanks

I did a fair bit of research before signing up for the courses and asked many people who are now CUA-certified whether the courses were neccessary or the study materials are sufficient. The majority of them said taking the courses was far better option for two reasons: 1) the in-course teaching and learning experience 2) the exam study materials aren’t sold separately.

However, I do believe that if you do get those materials and study them thoroughly and have sound knowledge of usability principles you would be able to pass the exam, at least from the second time.

Finally, if you do plan to take the courses, HFI has several branches in India including Bangalore (where I took mine) and Delhi. Check HFI’s updated courses schedule in India.

Hope this helps. Good luck in your endeavor.

Congrats! on your CUA certification.
I am Paras Aggarwal from New Delhi. I am a Graphics and multimedia designer for the past 9 years. I want to do the CUA certification. It would be really great if you can help me acheiving the target. I want to ask how did you prepare for the certification? Is it necessary to go to HFI and undertake their course? or can we prepare with other resources? Is there any institute in and around Delhi?
Look forward to your response :)
Paras Aggarwal
paras2004@gmail.com

Sathish Kingsley
Satyam

Thanks. You know as a matter of fact I’ll start off doing volunteer usability assessment work until I get myself established in the field. As for as you’re site is concerned, however, wake me when you have 5K unique visits a day :)

All the best for your Usability Career

I’m really happy for you and I know it’s just the beginning, putting what you’ve learned and achieved in a real life scenarios will leverage your level of experience to a practitioner… You know, for example, working on my site for free ;)

Thanks for the encouragement. Your latest post on blog usability really shows how much you already know about this stuff so I do encourage you to consider CUA certification.

BTW, you’ve got a really solid blog at Skellie.org. Very informative and easy to read. Looks like you really do practice what you preach :)

@Nassani:
The certification helps you in taking the common sense, guessing and personal opinions out of usability assessment (e.g., website usability evaluation). Now I have research to back me up and the combined knowledge and experience of so many usability professionals to learn from, imitate and expand upon.

@Doug:
Yeah I guess HFI is the only company in the market currently offering entry-level usability certification. My research for any similar organizations didn’t find anything quite like it.

By the way, I highly recommend this certification even for non-usability professionals. I believe IT professionals today must have a working knowledge of general usability concepts, since usability is becoming the the competitive advantage for lots of companies.

Probably you can tell us more on how this certain certification helped you, any examples that you could not do before the exam, and now you can do?

thanks,