Michael Richard Murphy

Badging for customers' own content

Pencil sketch of a ribbon badge with a check mark

Highlights

  • Made verifiable digital badges available for customers' custom content on an enterprise learning platform, which was the #1 customer request on our roadmap.
  • Integrated a partner's badge designer so admins could create on-brand badges, and built new admin tools to manage those designs and assign them to content.
  • The platform went on to issue 65M+ open, verifiable badges, the most of any open badge issuer at the time, and about 97% of them came from customers' own content.

The platform launched badging for its own courses first. Learners finished a course, usually passed an assessment, and earned a badge they could share on LinkedIn. Almost right away, customers started asking for the same thing for the content they uploaded themselves.

Demand wasn't the hard part. How to deliver it was. Our own badges were designed and managed in an internal publishing tool that was never meant for customers to see, so I had to work out what an admin actually needed to do on their own.

It came down to three things: design a badge that fits their brand, manage those designs over time, and assign them to content. We integrated our badging partner's designer for the first part, built new admin screens for the other two, and used the issuing system we already had.

We shipped it in two releases. The badge designer went first, which gave customers time to work with their marketing and design teams. When the tools for assigning badges to content followed, customers were ready to use them.