BCS Foundation Certificate in User Experience (UX)

The BCS Foundation Certificate in User Experience (UX) is tailored for those who want to create intuitive and engaging digital experiences. It’s a great fit for designers, developers, marketers, and product managers who influence or shape customer interactions with digital products. Even if you’re new to UX, this course provides a solid foundation in user research, usability, and accessibility, helping you put the user at the center of every design decision.

What You’ll Learn 

• An understanding of the importance of users’ needs, goals and tasks.
• An understanding of empirical measurements of user behaviour.
• An understanding of validated learning through prototyping and iterative design.
• Course Requirement
• This course does not have entry requirements, although candidates should have decent written English skills.

Course Features 

• 18 hours study time
• 1 hour assessment examination
• Physical classes.
• BCS Study materials.

Examination Format 

60 minutes supervised examination, with 40 multiple choice questions.

Pass mark is 65% (26/40)

Course Syllabus 

1. Introduction

2. Guiding Principles

• Importance of taking the user’s perspective
• Principles of user centred design
• Perspectives of systems
• Difference between usability and user experience
• Benefits of accessibility

3. User Research

• Research method to understand the context of use
• Principles of contextual inquiry
• Difference between opinion-based and behaviour-based research methods
• The components of the context of use
• The potential users of the system
• The importance of gaining informed consent form the users
• Steps in a suitable user research technique
• Questions to ask in user interviews
• Kinds of data that should be collected during a site visit to users.
• How to Interpret the data from a site visit in ways that can be used to develop a shared knowledge of the context of use.
• Discount usability research techniques (daily studies)
• Requirements gathering and conceptual design

4. Documenting User Research Findings

• Specific users of the system
• Descriptions of users that can be used for design.
• The rationale for focusing on user needs.
• Key user needs.
• Elements of a user story.

5. Measuring Usability

• Definition of usability
• How the definition of usability can be used to construct measures of usability.
• How to choose between good and poor design ideas by using behavioural data.
• The role design experiments play in validated learning.
• Differences between quantitative and qualitive usability research.
• The importance of good usability and iterative design.

6. Information Architecture

• How information flows between a person and a product or service.
• How to Choose appropriate schemes for classifying, organising and structuring information including functions and features.
• The steps in carrying out an open and a closed card sort.
• Comparison of an implementation model, a mental model and a conceptual model.
• The concept of affordance.

7. Interaction Design

• User interface design patterns
• How to choose the correct interactive control in a user interface design.
• How the choice of user interface control has an impact on the time it takes users to achieve their goals
• The concept of progressive disclosure.
• Difference between interaction design and information architecture.
• Why user interface consistency is an important design principle.
• Importance of focusing on the user’s tasks when designing the flow of a user interface.

8. Visual Design

• Fundamental principles of visual design.
• Advantages and disadvantages of using metaphorical representations in visual design.
• Fundamental basics on web content writing.

9. User Interface Prototyping

• Types of prototypes
• Appropriate type of prototype for the phase of design.
• The importance of identifying multiple different design solutions before deciding on a
• Specific design solution.

10. Usability Evaluation

• Difference between a usability inspection and a usability test.
• Nielsen’s Usability Heuristics and other usability principles
• Usability evaluations to test design hypotheses.
• How to moderate a usability test
• Good and poor tasks for a usability test.
• How to record the data from usability evaluations.
• Interpreting the data from usability tests to distinguish high and low severity usability problems
• The difference between observation and interpretation.
• W3C’s Web Content Accessibility Guidelines