Creativity: Methods to Design Better Products and Services
How This Course Will Transform Your Career
In This Course, You'll
Get excited as you learn to innovate and get creative, even when you feel blocked! Did you know that creative thinking is the second most important skill hiring managers look for, across all jobs and industries? This course will give you the skills to design innovative solutions and products that stand out. It's easier than you think! No matter your background, you can effortlessly learn to tap into creativity. You'll apply proven methods to break out of habitual thinking, spark new ideas anytime, and capture them before they disappear! Creativity is one of the most timeless and human-centered skills you can have. It protects you from being replaced by AI and helps you create work that is meaningful, valuable, and impossible to automate.
Make yourself invaluable with divergent and convergent ideation techniques that have real business impact. As AI takes over repetitive tasks, human creativity becomes more valuable. While AI assists in optimizing your creative processes, uniquely human traits like intuition, originality, and emotional depth keep creativity in demand. Companies that prioritize creativity achieve 67% more organic revenue growth. Creativity is just as valuable in finance, engineering, and healthcare as it is in creative professions. Every industry thrives on innovative ideas. In this course, you'll use ideation methods like multiple classifications and three-way comparisons to see opportunities others miss and bring bold ideas to life.
Gain confidence and credibility with 15+ downloadable templates to fast-track your creativity! You'll learn how to use busywork to enable your creativity in daily planning and foster a creative team environment. You'll apply step-by-step strategies to beat procrastination, bias, and fixation, and ensure your creative process remains productive—even under pressure. You'll get hands-on experience and walk away with a polished case study for your portfolio if you choose to complete the optional ideation project. If you want to solve big problems, improve lives, and build a better world with innovative solutions people love, then this course is the perfect place to start.
It's Easy to Fast-Track Your Career with the World's Best Experts
Master complex skills effortlessly with proven best practices and toolkits directly from the world's top design experts. Meet your experts for this course:
Alan Dix: Author of the bestselling book “Human-Computer Interaction” and Director of the Computational Foundry at Swansea University.
Don Norman: Father of User Experience (UX) Design, author of the legendary book “The Design of Everyday Things,” and co-founder of the Nielsen Norman Group.
Gain an Industry-Recognized UX Course Certificate
Use your industry-recognized Course Certificate on your resume, CV, LinkedIn profile or your website.
Our courses and Course Certificates are trusted by these industry leaders:
Why Learn Creativity?
Creativity: Methods to Design Better Products and Services falls under the umbrella term of User Experience (UX) design. UX design is your fast-track to a meaningful, secure, and rewarding career.
Worried You'll Lose Your Job to AI? UX Design Skills Make You AI-Proof
UX design builds on your core human strengths, such as emotional intelligence, deep human understanding, critical thinking, intuition, and imagination.
AI can't replicate your uniquely human ability to design for real emotions and needs such as joy, comfort, curiosity, safety, and a sense of belonging. These deeply human insights are your superpowers. With UX design skills, you'll turn them into products and experiences people truly love. You become irreplaceable, confident and in demand.
And yes, we'll also show you how to use AI to accelerate your results.
Feeling Stuck in the 9–5? Design Your Freedom
Tired of feeling undervalued, anxious, or trapped in your career? UX design skills open doors to freedom, flexibility, remote work, and a career you're excited about—without starting from scratch.
Stop wondering if you could be more. Start realizing your full potential today.
UX Design is Booming: Accelerate Your Career to Higher Salaries and Impact Across All Jobs and Industries
Salaries for people with design skills are soaring, often surpassing $200K in cities like San Francisco, and job growth is strong (13% globally). Why? Because companies thrive when their users are happy. Companies that invest in great design outperform the S&P 500 Index by a whopping 228%.
Design a Life You Love
Great design is all about helping people meet their needs and achieve their goals through intuitive, meaningful, and delightful experiences. Skills in design will empower you to create experiences and products that make people's lives easier and more fulfilling. And when people love what you create, your business thrives, and your salary potential grows. You get the ultimate double win:
You'll feel deeply fulfilled by designing experiences and products people love.
You'll be financially rewarded for your real-world impact.
Course Overview: What You'll Master
- Each week, one lesson becomes available.
- There's no time limit to finish a course. Lessons have no deadlines.
- Estimated learning time: 23 hours 4 mins spread over 5 weeks.
Lesson 0: Welcome and Introduction
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0.1: Get Help, Career Advice, and Job Opportunities (1 min)
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0.2: How to Get Your Course Certificate (16 mins)
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0.3: Grow Your Global Network and Build Your Brand (11 mins)
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0.4: Global Skills, Local Jobs: Build Your Network in Your Area (1 min)
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0.5: Gain Timeless Skills Through Courses from IxDF (21 mins)
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0.6: Mandatory vs Optional Lesson Items (7 mins)
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0.7: Learn Smarter: The Perfect Mix of Video and Text (6 mins)
Lesson 1: What Is Creativity and How Do You Think Outside of the Box with Divergent Thinking?
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1.1: Welcome to Creativity: Methods to Design Better Products and Services (29 mins)
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1.2: Understand the Various Types of Creativity (59 mins)
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1.3: What are the Stages of Creativity? (9 mins)
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1.4: What is the Difference between Puzzles, Problems and Wicked Problems? (1 hour 12 mins)
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1.5: How to Think Outside the Box (19 mins)
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1.6: Ideation Methods: Bad Ideas (30 mins)
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1.7: Activity: Come Up with a Great Bad Idea (21 mins)
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1.8: What’s Good About Bad Ideas? (37 mins)
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1.9: How to Think and Work Divergently – 4 Ideation Methods (41 mins)
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1.10: Congratulations and Recap – Plus a Fun Challenge (23 mins)
Lesson 2: Convergence: How to Uncover Knowledge and Be Creative Through Analytical Thinking
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2.1: Welcome and Introduction (8 mins)
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2.2: Convergence – How to Be Creative Through Analytical Thinking (36 mins)
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2.3: How to Use Your Existing Knowledge to Come Up with New Ideas (1 hour 7 mins)
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2.4: Externalization: 4 Ways and Methods to Uncover Your Tacit Knowledge (43 mins)
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2.5: Ideation Method: Three-way Comparisons (27 mins)
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2.6: Ideation Method: More Specific and More General (38 mins)
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2.7: Ideation Method: Embrace Opposites (15 mins)
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2.8: Ideation Method: Multiple Classifications (59 mins)
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2.9: TAPT: Teasing Apart, Piecing Together (30 mins)
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2.10: Activity: Use the TAPT Method to Take a Walk with a Friend—Online (33 mins)
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2.11: Congratulations and Recap (14 mins)
Lesson 3: How to Nurture Your Own Creativity and Build a Creative Team Environment
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3.1: Welcome and Introduction (7 mins)
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3.2: How to Supercharge Yourself to Get More Creative (41 mins)
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3.3: Wake Up and Take a Shower with Alan Dix – and Learn to Nurture Your Creative Ideas (48 mins)
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3.4: How to Capture Your Ideas Before They Disappear (16 mins)
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3.5: How to overcome Fixation and Bias in Creative Problem Solving (1 hour 20 mins)
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3.6: 3 Personal Habits That Will Foster Your Creativity (30 mins)
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3.7: 14 Barriers to Creativity and Ideation in Your Team – and How to Overcome Them (28 mins)
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3.8: How to Create an Environment That Nurtures Creativity (31 mins)
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3.9: Try Different Roles to Solve Your Problems – Edward de Bono’s Six Thinking Hats (27 mins)
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3.10: Congratulations and Recap – Plus a Fun Challenge (27 mins)
Lesson 4: How to Plan and Time-Manage Creative Projects to Guarantee Successful Outcomes
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4.1: Welcome and Introduction (7 mins)
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4.2: Can You Time-Manage Creativity? (15 mins)
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4.3: How to Plan for Creativity: Effective Time-Management Plans for Your Large-Scale Creative Projects (44 mins)
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4.4: Optional Activity to Help You Start Managing a Creative Project: Plan Your Creative Tasks (8 mins)
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4.5: How to Harness the Power of To-Do Lists in Your Short-Term Time-Management Plans (35 mins)
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4.6: How to Use Busywork to Enable Your Creativity in Your Daily Planning (53 mins)
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4.7: Plan for Incubation Time: When Is Doing Nothing the Best Thing to Do? (21 mins)
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4.8: 5 Best Practices: What to do When You Get Stuck in Executing Your Creative Work Plan (52 mins)
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4.9: What is the Best Plan for Creativity? (9 mins)
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4.10: Do You Want to Incorporate Your Creative Methods Into an Entirely Human-centered Design Process? (5 mins)
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4.11: Build Your Portfolio: Divergent Ideation (17 mins)
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4.12: Build Your Portfolio: Convergent Ideation (17 mins)
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4.13: Conversations (6 mins)
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4.14: Congratulations and Recap (7 mins)
Lesson 5: Course Certificate, Final Networking, and Course Wrap-up
How Others Have Benefited
Gaby Vargas, Chile
“I really loved the way Alan explained the course; he's very polite and kind. I felt really good watching the videos. It didn't feel like taking a class, it was more like having a conversation and getting advice from someone that really wants to help you and that's really good at his job.”
Richie McGirr, United States
“As an instructor, Alan Dix is very engaging. I felt like he was talking to me as a friend the entire time. He also obviously knows his stuff. This was a very fun and useful class. Useful for anyone who makes stuff, even for people like me who do a little bit of design but mostly write code.”
Tirzah Strobos, South Africa
“Alan is so interesting. He is relatable. He tells stories; he doesn't give lectures. He keeps you engaged through the entire video and course because he is so passionate about it, and it resonates with me.”
How It Works
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Lessons are self-paced so you'll never be late for class or miss a deadline.
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