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Hey there everybody, it’s Michael from the VerifyEd design and development team. I wanted to share with you the latest work we’ve been doing to improve your experience when organising and sharing your achievements with the world.
We’ll be rolling out an update to how you collate and share certificates. Before I jump in, let’s talk about how we got to where we are.
The bottom of a drawer. In a box behind the sofa. Somewhere at home. That’s what we were told when we asked people where their certificates were. These things that people worked so hard for are now tucked away with the dust mites, unlikely to ever see the light of day again.
But what about when you’re applying for a new job? If you’re a recent graduate the market will be tougher than ever before — so you’ll need to be able to show off everything you’ve accomplished.
That’s what we want to help with.
So we embarked on a project to help you organise and share all your achievements in VerifyEd so you have one less thing to worry about.
🤔 How should organisation work?
This was one of the key questions. We knew we had to allow for the organisation and sharing of achievements but we didn’t want to randomly guess how.
So we asked you, the learners, how you’d want to organise things.
There were two key findings which fed into this new release. Our research identified a desire to:
1. Sort achievements by newest first as the default.
2. Share achievements in personalised ‘collections’ (for example, to help when applying for a job if a particular selection of certificates could improve chances of an interview).
From there, we ideated about the best way we could help you meet these goals. We created numerous designs and tested them, again, with learners to ensure the journey was smooth and without any hiccups.
Once we were satisfied that organising your content was intuitive, we moved onto development. This included automated testing to ensure the release was bug-free (we added 39 tests to our pre-existing testing suite) and also accessibility testing. We currently run Google Lighthouse audits initially — ensuring every page gets 100/100 — and then move on to manual screenreader testing, navigating different flows to see if there is anywhere to improve. We take inclusive design seriously, and you should be able to feel that when you use VerifyEd.
🤓 Show us the update already
Okay, okay! Without further ado, here’s what you can expect from your VerifyEd experience in the next few weeks:
As you can see, your profile is your new home on VerifyEd. This makes it easier for you to share your profile with others. This page also includes the new organisation options.
You may have noticed your dashboard is now split into two sections: Certificates and Collections. Your certificates are your individual achievements, while your Collections can be a number of achievements you have grouped together.
In this example, you can see Testy McTesterson has created two collections for some upcoming job interviews. The Google one is public so anyone with the link to the collection or his public profile can look at it. The IBM one is private right now, so only he can see it.
☝️ Note: if you move a private certificate to a public collection, it will automatically become public.
Adding a certificate to a collection is easy, with a dropdown menu showing all your collections. Just click one to add it. If the certificate is already in there, a small checkmark will appear on the right-hand side.
You can also create a new collection from this menu and the certificate will be automatically added to it.
You may have also noticed we’ve added some sorting options for your certificates and collections.
The default sort is newest first, as suggested by you guys in earlier research, but we also added the ability to sort by oldest and certificate/collection name (alphabetically).
That’s it for this update. You’ll be able to experience it soon. Let us know what you think!
Stay safe, Michael ✌️
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