Badges/Design

To boost community involvement and interest in badges, we had a user-centered design approach. We started with figuring out who our users will be and what they will expect.

Community Research and Personas
Who will interact with our badge system?

We found that our community is made up of different categories of people with different needs and expectations. For us these categories were: published faculty members, student contributors, event participants, general collaborators, and advocates.

From surveys and conversations with our community members we found that our community would be most interested in badges if our system allowed badge recipients to:


 * Receive badges via email;
 * Put badges on their personal website or professional profile;
 * Give Open.Michigan permission to share their badge;
 * Have a way to see who else earned badges and why; and
 * Create their own badges and self-assign them.

An overview of our survey and research methodology can be found at: Evaluation Metrics Project

Workflow and Usecases
How will people interact with our badge system?

For our system we determined that there are three types of users:


 * the badge recipient -- the community member (student, faculty, general advocate, etc.) that received a badge from us.
 * the general user -- anyone looking at our site to learn more about our badge project.
 * the administrator -- the person in our office that monitors the badge system and assigns badges if necessary.

To better understand how these users interact with our system we created a workflow diagram. The diagram helped us see the pages that we needed to build and the actions users will likely be doing on our site. We also created a preliminary set of wireframes and usecases.



Identifying Badges
We repeat this step constantly. Currently, we’re interested in badges that help learners set individual goals, assess where they are in learning, where they want to be, and how to make sense of their educational and personal identity. We’re focusing on identity and community-based badges as a start.

A great overview of badge types and how they can be used is provided by the Mozilla Open Badges Initiative at: About Badges.

A key feature of our badge system design is that we will be releasing our badges in several rounds. Thinking about badges in rounds helps us identify and release starting badges that we can later build on, create new badges that continue to engage our community, and eliminate badges that don't work between rounds. For our first round of badges we will be releasing:


 * Community Agent Badge
 * dScribe Trailblazer Badge
 * Open Publisher Badge
 * Open Ally Badge
 * Copyright Camper Badge
 * Catalyst Catalyzer Badge
 * Catalyst Collider Badge
 * Open Access Week Badge

Our next round of badges is being determined through an iterative brainstorming process where we try to figure out what badges will be the most valued by our community. To see some artifacts of our process, please visit our Flickr account

Currently we are working to create badges in the following general groups:


 * General Knowledge about Openness and Open Practices
 * Specific Knowledge about Openness and Open Practices
 * Advanced Knowledge about Openness and Open Practices
 * Open.Michigan Specific Achievements
 * User Assigned Identity