How to Build Learner-Centric Info Products

“Just package what you know into a 5-module course” is the advice that built an entire industry. It’s also what’s killing it.

We got drunk on digital dopamine and called it “learning.”
Meanwhile, the world changed. But the course format didn’t.

Now? The wreckage is visible.

Scroll through any creator’s drive and you’ll find 12 dusty course folders, 6 forgotten notion templates, and 1 refund email they were too polite to send. People aren’t just fatigued — they’re fed up.

Burnout isn’t a bug of the info product economy. It’s a feature.

And weirdly enough, it’s a feature we can trace back to a missing ingredient no one bothered to smuggle in from the tech world:
Design Thinking.

I didn’t stumble onto this idea as a marketing ploy.
I discovered it in the chaos of my own burnout.
During a sabbatical-turned-experiment helping other creators untangle their offers, I realized—

Most info products aren’t broken because they’re too simple.

They’re broken because they’re too selfish.

It’s time to fix that.

Not with more tactics. But with better thinking.

Buckle up, its about to get weird.

🧯 Why the “Course Model” Is Cracking

Here’s a thought experiment:
What if every startup used PowerPoint decks instead of prototypes?

That’s what’s happening in the info product world.

Creators are shipping knowledge products the way people ship investor pitch decks—
🧠 All signal, no simulation.

And the results?

🔻 The Cracks Are Showing

• Saturation and sameness: Every course now feels like a TikTok carousel stretched across five modules.
  
• Learner fatigue: Self-paced online courses often have lower completion rates (sometimes as low as 12.6%, source: Edwiser), but cohort-based or instructor-led online courses can achieve completion rates above 85-90% due to increased social interaction and engagement (source: Learnopoly).
  
• Misfit learning architecture: The “step-by-step” model assumes everyone learns like they’re assembling IKEA furniture. But many modern learners? They’re binge-consumers, not sequential achievers.
  
• The myth of “finish = success”: Completion rates don’t equal transformation. Emotional payoff does.

Let’s go deeper.

🛠 The Real Problem Is Design

Let’s borrow from Herbert Simon, a Nobel laureate and influential figure in the field of design who said:

So if your info product is meant to cause behavior change (which it is), then…

You’re not just an educator. You’re a designer.

Yet most info products aren’t designed. They’re dumped.

And this isn’t about adding “cute UI.” It’s about designing the flow of cognition and emotion.

⚠️ And when that’s missing, you don’t just lose engagement —
you lose trust, transformation, and the business model.

That’s why people bounce.

They aren’t lazy. They’re overloaded &  misaligned.

Design failure masquerading as “bad clients” is one of the most expensive delusions in the creator economy.

So, what’s next?

If the course is crumbling,
What comes after the course?

Let’s open that door.

🧠 Design Thinking for Info Creators: A Crash Reorientation

Let me be honest.

I didn’t discover Design Thinking in a blog post.
I discovered it in a breakdown.

My brain was melted cheese. My offers were Frankenstein’s.
I had burned through 4 launches, 3 rewrites, 2 identity crises… and exactly zero sustainable products.

At the time, I thought I had a content problem.
But what I really had was a systems design problem wearing a personal development hat.

And it wasn’t just me.

Across every Zoom call during my sabbatical, I kept hearing the same quiet chaos from creators (paraphrased):

That’s when I started pulling a thread that led me far outside the creator economy echo chamber—
into IDEO case studies, HBR’s breakdown of Jobs-to-Be-Done, and obscure behavioral design journals from 2011.

And what I realized?

Most info products are created like blogs: designed to publish, not to perform.

But what if we built them like products?
Not just “teach what you know,” but design how people grow.

That’s where Design Thinking enters the room—wearing lab goggles and throwing out your five-module template.

🧩 Wait—What Is Design Thinking Again?

Let’s get the nerdy stuff out of the way:

Design Thinking is a problem-solving framework used by product designers, startup teams, and innovation labs.
It’s not about “being creative.” It’s about thinking systematically, like a behavior architect.

The flow:

Empathize → Define → Ideate → Prototype → Test

This isn’t just some sticky-note workshop agenda.
It’s a worldview. One that turns vague ideas into tangible user experiences.

But here’s what hit me hardest:

Creators don’t think like designers & architects.
They think like content distributors trying to engineer impact from the outside in.

Educators teach.
Marketers sell.
But Designers & Architects? They shape flow & transformation through interaction.

Which is what info products are supposed to do.
But most don’t.

Why?

Because they’re not built for transformation.
They’re built for output—
content pushed to an audience like spam to a mailbox,
based on what creators think the user wants.

It’s the digital equivalent of yelling life advice into a crowded bar and hoping someone buys your $297 PDF.

Let’s fix that.

📐 The R.E.F.R.A.M.E. System — A Creator’s Take on Design Thinking

To translate the classic design thinking flow into the IA builder’s toolkit, I created a system called R.E.F.R.A.M.E.

Let’s break it down:

🔍 R — Realign with the Learner’s Core Need

What they want ≠ what they need.
Creators often build for surface desires (“grow your following”) instead of root causes (“prove your value to yourself”).

To realign, we use:

• Empathy interviews
• Audience mining (forums, testimonial mining, private DMs)
• The Jobs-to-Be-Done theory

📌 See Also: “How to Kill Your Info Product (& save it)”

⛰️ E — Embrace Friction as a Design Signal

Friction isn’t always failure.
Sometimes it’s feedback in disguise.

Smooth is forgettable. Strategic friction is memorable.

Don’t remove the bump. Design around it.
Create “choice points” where the user pauses, reflects, and recommits.

Think:

• Challenge → Insight → Activation
  Not:
• Slide → Slide → Zzzzz…
  

🧩 F — Format for Non-Linear Consumption

Courses are IKEA manuals.
People want Netflix.

Your learners don’t move linearly. They jump. Skip. Binge. Rewatch.
So build:

• Modular content blocks
• Flexible pathways (Think: “choose your own transformation”)
• Completion-in-5-minutes microloops

📌 Link: “Info Design: How to architect your info products”

🔁 R — Repurpose Failure into Feature-Sets

Every dead product is raw material.

That abandoned workbook? Turn it into an interactive tool.
That module nobody watched? Use it as a bonus inside a shorter, stronger product.

Good design doesn’t fear failure. It prototypes it.

🧠 A — Assume the Learner is Overwhelmed

This is non-negotiable.

In a 2022 study by Nielsen Norman Group, digital learners showed a 7-second scan time before they decided whether to commit.

Design for scannability and psychological safety:

• Chunk content
• Layer progression (novice → intermediate → advanced)
• Use default choices to nudge behavior

🎯 M — Make ‘Done’ a Feeling, Not a Finish Line

“Completion rates” are a lie.
They don’t measure emotional closure.

What matters?

• The dopamine payoff
• The identity upgrade
• The loop that closes the transformation arc

This is where design meets narrative. Don’t hand them modules. Give them a character arc.

Which also aids in Law #9: The IA Reinforcement Loop

There’s 10 more hidden laws just like this in the “The Hidden Curriculum of Creator Economy”

🎥 E — Elevate with Intentional Story Architecture

People don’t quit info products because they’re too long.
They quit because the emotional pacing is broken.

You need:

• Narrative hooks
• Surprise beats
• Payoff loops
• A moment of earned victory

Use the Pixar Spine meets Product Flow Matrix:

This is your curriculum engine.
The course is just the container.

🧭 Strategic Takeaway:

Design Thinking isn’t about aesthetics or structure.
It’s about power—the power to shape attention, emotion, and behavior in service of transformation.

But if you’re still building info products the way you build Instagram carousels—linear, loud, surface-level—you’re not competing with other creators.
You’re competing with user fatigue.

And fatigue always wins.

🧪 Common Mistakes When Applying Design Thinking

Even smart creators faceplant here. Why? Because they mistake surface polish for product design—and confuse insight with assumption.

This part of the system? It wasn’t theory for me. It was post-burnout autopsy. Here’s what actually cost traction:

1. Pretty ≠ Functional

Design thinking isn’t about smooth fonts and flowy gradients. It’s about behavioral friction—engineered or eliminated with purpose.

I once spent weeks polishing a Notion-based course. Font pairings? Divine. UI? Like a startup’s landing page. Outcome? Crickets.

Why? It didn’t help anyone do anything better.

✍️ Learning design isn’t visual design. It’s cognitive architecture.

2. Skipping the Prototype Phase

You know what’s faster than a funnel? A fake door.

Yet most creators build like they’re manufacturing aircraft engines. Ten weeks later, no validation, no traction. Your job isn’t to guess what works—it’s to fail in public early and safely.

Economists call this option value. Creators call it “soft launching.” Same thing.

Think MVP = Minimum Viable Payoff.

3. Over-Customization Kills

Personalized onboarding, dynamic paths, adaptive curriculum… sounds cool until your user gets analysis paralysis.

In behavioral econ, it’s the choice overload problem (Iyengar & Lepper, 2000).
Sometimes the “perfect product” is actually a too-smart trap.

4. Designing for “Everyone” is Designing for No One

This one? Burned me bad.

I tried making a product that worked for freelancers, execs, and creators. Result? Frankenstein UX.

Design thinking forces a constraint:

Who are you designing for right now and what are they stuck in?
Not what they say. What they do.

Jobs-to-Be-Done (Clayton Christensen, HBR) calls this “hiring” a product.
→ (See: Jobs-to-be-Done)

🚀 Closing: The Future Is Designed

The next info product boom won’t be courses. It’ll be creators-as-experience-architects.

Because here’s what I realized during my sabbatical:
Most burnout didn’t come from content.
It came from systems that weren’t designed to scale insight without scaling stress.

Design thinking lets you opt out of that trap.
It’s the skill that bridges teaching and transformation—strategy and storytelling.
It lets you turn “I teach X” into “I design change.”

So instead of asking “What should my next product be?”, try this:

This isn’t a philosophy. It’s a weapon.
In a creator economy drowning in content, design thinking is how you build signal.

Your info product isn’t just a download.
It’s a system of belief + behavior + emotion.

Make it designed. Make it felt.
Make it so good it feels like cheating.

(Writing this piece has taken me upwards of 20+ hours, from all the research to making sense of things and putting it up in a slightly easy-to-digest format.
So for some reason, if you decide to share this piece of content with others on social, it’ll be appreciated (and won’t go unnoticed, so thank you).

Sudhanshu Pai

Sudhanshu Pai is the writer of THE INFO CREATOR DEPT. He spends his days researching knowledge business, creators economy, why & how 7 fig info business scale (or flop) and generally figuring out blueprints, breakthroughts and strategies to help creator educators get higher return on their expertise.

The deep dives and other content take more than 100 hours to put together, so sharing this content with others on social media will be much appreciated (and won’t go unnoticed.)

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