A Smoother Badge Creation Experience Is Coming to Canvas Credentials

DoraJekkel · ‎06-04-2025

Dear Canvas Credentials Community,

We’re always looking for ways to make Canvas Credentials easier and more intuitive to use—especially for the everyday tasks you rely on most. One of those tasks is badge creation, and based on your feedback, we’re making a series of thoughtful updates to streamline that experience.

These changes won’t overhaul how you create badges, but they will make the process clearer, faster to navigate, and more consistent with the rest of the Instructure product family. This helps ensure that Canvas Credentials continues to feel familiar and efficient, even as our platform evolves.

What’s Changing?

You’ll soon notice a set of refinements in the badge creation and edit flow, including improvements to field organization, helper text placement, modal behaviors, and certificate template selection.

“Basic Info” becomes “Badge Essentials”
We’re renaming the section and moving Achievement Type, Skills, Tags, and Expiration into it. These fields are among the most frequently used and impactful when building meaningful micro-credentials. Grouping them together helps ensure that critical information is captured up front—without jumping between sections.
Helper text moves below section titles
Previously, helper text appeared off to the right hand side, which made it harder to notice and disrupted the reading flow. Placing it directly beneath section titles keeps the focus in one place and improves comprehension.

Image 2025. 06. 03. at 17.29.jpeg

Improved Certificate Template Selection
Selecting and previewing print certificate templates is now easier and faster. Templates are organized into collapsible sections, can be selected using checkboxes, and include visual previews.

Improved modal behavior for image uploads
Canceling an image upload will now return you to the badge creation flow instead of exiting it entirely—fixing a long-standing issue that caused frustration.
Removed error counters on tabs
To simplify the interface and reduce confusion, tab-level error indicators are being removed. Error messages will continue to appear at the field level where needed.
Comma-separated tags
We’ve enabled support for comma-separated tags in the Tags field, so you can now add multiple tags at once instead of one by one. This makes adding and managing tags faster and easier.

Flexible Skills and Standard Alignments Update
The process for adding flexible skills and standard alignments has been updated to use a new tray for each entry making the experience more consistent with other parts of the product and improving the user experience.

Why?

We’re making these changes to:

Improve usability and reduce small points of friction
From better helper text placement to more intuitive modal behavior, these refinements are designed to simplify your workflow without changing how you work.
Help you create meaningful badges and certificates more efficiently
Grouping key fields and improving certificate selection helps you focus on what matters most—building high-quality credentials with less effort.
Align the experience with other Instructure products
These updates bring Canvas Credentials closer to Instructure’s broader design system, making the interface more familiar, consistent, and easy to adopt.

What to Expect

These updates will roll out automatically:

🔹 Beta release on June 10

🔹 Production release on June 16

There’s nothing you need to do. While subtle, they’re designed to make the badge creation and edit flow easier to navigate and more consistent with the rest of the Instructure ecosystem.

You’ll also notice a few additional UI improvements:

Selected skills now appear as modern Tags—consistent with other Instructure products and clearly positioned below the input for easier scanning and management.
Markdown-supported sections now appear in structured boxes for better readability.