Overview
O'Reilly Media, Inc. is a SaaS company that delivers technical and professional development through its online platform. Over the past year, they made significant progress in evolving their structured learning offerings, allowing users to dive deeper into online courses that support their professional growth. These courses can be self-assigned or assigned by a manager, offering flexibility based on individual or team goals. To make course completion more meaningful, each course is digitally credentialed. Upon finishing, learners receive a verifiable badge that can be shared on LinkedIn, added to resumes and professional profiles, or downloaded as a PDF certificate, providing tangible proof of skills and accomplishments. At O’Reilly, we partnered with Credly to manage badge distribution. This platform allowed us to create, issue, and track digital badges as part of the badging initiative, a key step in recognizing and showcasing learner achievements.
Goals
The company set two primary goals: first, to boost user engagement by increasing course enrollment and completion; second, to collaborate with company administrators seeking targeted employee training, thereby expanding course offerings through third-party designers.
Users and audience
Our core audience consists of B2B learners who have completed a course and need official proof of completion. They often share this proof with managers, add it to professional networks like LinkedIn, or use it to meet certification requirements.
Our secondary audience includes admins at B2B companies that use Credly. These companies rely on trusted, pre-approved O’Reilly courses to encourage employees to build essential job skills through the O’Reilly platform.
Scope and constraints
This was one of the faster-paced projects I worked on, with the entire design process scoped to just six weeks. The aggressive timeline meant we had to move quickly from concept to final designs, with usability testing deferred until after engineering handoff.