Whatever job you hold, user experience is—or should be—a part of it. That’s why usability testing is such a good fit for technical communicators. We are the voice of the user, so why not also be able to share what we learn from users by observing how they work with our products? We learn from them, educate ourselves and other product stakeholders about who our users are and how they interact with our products, and make our products better as user experience improves.

What’s not to like in this picture?

Perhaps this picture doesn’t represent your current job description. Perhaps your company doesn’t know what it’s missing in not understanding the user’s experience first-hand, and you want to be the one to advocate for a testing program. Maybe you are conducting usability testing but you’ve done it without formal training. Or perhaps you had a course in college, but you’re not up on best practices today.

Whether you are self-taught, unschooled in the topic, or looking to upgrade your skills, this certificate course will take you step by step through the process of planning and conducting a test, analyzing the results, and reporting them—with the goal of educating yourself and other stakeholders on the user’s experience and advocating for more testing, more often.

As a hands-on workshop based in best practices, you will work in small teams on a project of mutual interest and share the results with all of us. With lots of discussion to help everyone digest the material and learn from each other, you will progress through the stages of planning, testing, and reporting. Your deliverables will reflect a fully developed test project that you can share with others to promote your skills in usability testing.

Upon completion of this course, you will be able to demonstrate the ability to:

• plan an effective usability study
• conduct an effective usability study
• analyze the resulting data in meaningful ways
• report the findings in effective ways