FEATURED CASE STUDY
Defining the User Landscape for Credential Quality Signals
Realigning a multi-stakeholder ecosystem to guide product investment.
The Goal
Enable employers to confidently trust and use non-degree credentials in hiring decisions by making outcomes-based quality signals legible, credible, and actionable.
My Role
Lead UX researcher and strategist responsible for discovery planning, qualitative research, synthesis, and recommendations that informed next phase scope and product direction.
Key Insights
The effective audience targets were misaligned with the project’s initial hypothesis.
Through discovery, I learned the primary consumers of the EQOS Quality Signal were not educators or employers directly, but intermediaries (e.g., applicant tracking systems, education marketplaces) that translate credential quality into hiring and training decisions.
Employers emerged as the system’s power brokers—but engagement occurs most effectively through their intermediaries. This shifted the UX problem from explaining quality to enabling intermediaries to operationalize trust at scale.
Impact
Project leadership and our funder acted on my findings, refocusing the next phase of work on intermediary-led use cases, employer-driven adoption pathways, and tooling designed for translation rather than direct consumption.
My Challenge
Validate whether educators and employers were the right primary audiences for an outcomes-based credential quality signal—and identify a viable adoption pathway for early product development.
Users, Scope and Constraints
Initial audiences included educators, employers, funders, and policy makers, with workers/learners as downstream beneficiaries.
Given timeline and budget constraints, and with guidance from subject matter experts at Jobs For the Future (JFF), this phase prioritized educators and employers to validate where the highest early value and adoption potential existed.
My Process
Reviewed dozens of publications from EQOS, JFF, and ecosystem partners to establish baseline assumptions
Developed initial problem statements and a qualitative interview plan
Conducted 10 interviews with internal SMEs and external education, workforce, and hiring intermediaries, focusing on trust signals, adoption barriers, and decision-making incentives
Iteratively refined questions as patterns emerged
Synthesized findings and presented recommendations to project leadership and funders
Organizations
EQOS, JFFLabs, Burning Glass Institute (BGI), Gitlab (funder)
My Role
UX Research Lead & Strategist
Date / Duration
Jun 2023 – Aug 2024
