I’m very happy and relieved that I passed the Human Factors International—Certified Usability Analyst Exam. I believe my experience taking the exam is atypical in that I passed the test without taking any of their seminars.
I was very interested to see if I could pass the exam as a benchmark of my knowledge and experience. It was a very tough exam and I had to take the test more than once to pass (HFI allows one free retest if you fail the first time). I think the exam is probably a lot less stressful if you’ve taken the seminars, but each person’s learning style and preference is different. I chose not to take the seminars because I would need to finance it myself. However, I hope I have the opportunity to take the seminars sometime in the future. I’ve heard from reputable sources that they are excellent and worthwhile.
I studied every possible thing I could find on the HFI site. With the help of a study partner, I read about 60 research papers, the 11 gui design articles form the website, 22 white papers from the website, the UI Design Newsletters from the website (at least read December for each year) and I analyzed the glossary. I also read About Face 3 by Alan Cooper and The Usability Engineering Lifecycle by Deborah J. Mayhew. I compiled a 27-page Word document of notes (sorry I won’t share this, as I said each person’s learning style and preference is different).
The advice I would give to those planning to take the exam without the seminars would be to study a lot and/or have a lot of experience in the field. Is the exam tailored to the seminars? I don’t think so. I think the seminars are probably the fastest and most efficient way to learn the material that’s on the exam. However, I’m proof that it’s possible to pass the exam without the seminars. Good luck on your CUA exam!
I finally updated my website with standards-compliant coding and incorporated a blog using WordPress, which appears to be a really great personal content management system. I made a custom theme that’s strongly inspired by jeffcroft.com and a theme called “Hemingway” by Kyle Neath.
I love working with standards. The payoff is seeing the really organized code at the end, but that requires vigilant attention to both the big picture and every little detail.
Figuring out WordPress was not too difficult and the community spirit helped a lot. However, there are some things about WordPress that seem a little frustrating. Sometimes it was tricky for me to customize what I wanted it to do. It also puts in some code that I don’t really always want (like div ids with underscores, or other things like <li> tags and <p> tags that I would prefer to do myself). Of course these are tiny criticisms of a really outstanding product that is relatively easy to use with tons of helpful and informative resources available.