IxDF Certificate of Completion

Apply Peter Morville's seven key factors of user experience to evaluate what makes a design work or fall short.

Use Jesse James Garrett's five elements of UX to see how decisions at the strategy, scope, structure, and skeleton levels shape what users ultimately experience at the surface.

Apply Human-Centered Design as a foundational mindset to focus on people and their context throughout any design project.

Use Design Thinking as an iterative, problem-solving process to move past surface-level symptoms, identify the root cause of a problem, and explore a wide range of possible solutions.

Deploy Design Sprints as a time-boxed method when working on high-risk projects with cross-functional teams.

Produce the full range of UX deliverables, including wireframes, sitemaps, user flows, prototypes, journey maps, and usability reports, and choose the right ones based on the project, team, and stakeholders.

Conduct a competitive analysis to understand how comparable products solve user problems.

Use heuristic evaluation in the design process, to stress-test structure and interaction decisions mid-build, and to diagnose the reasons behind usability issues before and after testing with users.

Apply empathy as a structured design discipline, distinct from sympathy, to set aside assumptions and gain genuine insight into users' needs, motivations, and contexts.

Run user interviews that uncover what users actually need, not just what they say they want, and synthesize findings into personas grounded in observed behavior and research patterns, not assumed demographics.

Conduct task analysis to break down how users accomplish goals step by step, and build user journey maps.

Ideate using structured techniques, including the rules of effective brainstorming, to generate as many ideas as possible before judging or prioritizing them.

Sketch ideas rapidly, treating low-fidelity output as a tool for thinking rather than a commitment to any one direction.

Create wireframes and paper prototypes to test ideas quickly.

Plan and run usability tests that generate clear, actionable findings.

Understand the role of a UX designer within Agile development processes.