From UX writing duo to content design quartet: Looking back over a year of achievements.
It’s time for our team at OpenClassrooms to take a step back and look at everything we’ve achieved in the past year.
So, what have we been up to? Let’s just say we’ve been busy! Read on to find out…
Our organization
Recruit
The last time we wrote about our team at OpenClassrooms, our manager Morgane CONSTANT had just joined us. She set about doing an audit and sharing her vision.
I guess I gave it away in the title but, to align with Morgane’s vision, we changed our team name and our job titles. We’re now the Content Design team! You can read more about this change and the reasons behind it in Morgane’s dedicated article.
At the end of 2021, with a view to OpenClassrooms’ international ambitions, we set about recruiting our second English-speaking Content Designer. We were delighted when Helen Frith joined us, given everything her experience at gov.uk could bring to our team.
Organize
Since Hélène Legendre and I initiated the Content Design team in early 2020, the Technology team had grown from three squads (feature teams) to ten squads divided into three tribes. To best support these squads, we decided to split our work by tribes, with the vision of having an English and a French Content Designer per tribe.
The Technology team later introduced a simpler, more logical two-tribe organization so we currently cover all current language needs as a team of four.
This ties in with our Content Design team’s global approach: Set up a sustainable organization that delivers more and more value, while still being flexible enough to adapt to roadmap priorities.
Our initiatives
Improve
To improve the quality, efficiency, and effectiveness of the Product Design team, we need time to work on topics that don’t fit into squad roadmaps.
We use “Improvement Days” to work on team initiatives. In the Content Design team, we currently dedicate ten percent of our time (two days a month) to Improvement Days.
In the last year, we worked on a number of initiatives led by Product Designers. Those aimed at reducing design debt and defining and measuring user goals more accurately are a couple of examples.
We also led and contributed to several initiatives on our content design roadmap.
Assess
We set up a content design survey and shared it with various teams. The goals were to:
- measure comprehension of our role and scope, so we could adapt awareness initiatives as necessary
- identify use of the tools we’d put in place, so we could better communicate about them or update them
- understand content creation needs to help us prioritize creation of self-service tools
- continuously improve the way we work
We identified several opportunities and actions from the survey results. This gave our team themes to focus on over the following months:
- Integrate into and prioritize in squads
- Evangelize and clarify our scope
- Integrate into the design process
- Give others more autonomy with tools
- Improve processes
We’ll soon be sending out a follow-up survey to measure the results of these actions.
Prioritize
Although our ratio of Product Designers to Content Designers is improving, there are still more initiatives than we can cover. To make sure we focus on those where we can have the most significant impact, we set up a priority framework to identify high-value topics and track time spent on them versus time spent on out-of-scope and non-prioritized topics.
H1 results revealed that we spent seventy-eight percent of our time on high-value subjects, meaning we achieved our Key Result of sixty percent.
With each iteration of our priority framework, we’re acting on feedback, making it simpler and more efficient.
Intrigued? Read Hélène’s article about our framework and high-value topics.
Evangelize
To continue spreading the word and showcasing our team, we created a content design masterclass. We hosted it via the UX Writers FR meetup and within OpenClassrooms to help teams better understand our role and value.
We held a workshop to identify how to work more efficiently with Product Designers and User Researchers. As upskilling on content design was most requested, we held a training session. We shared a “Product Designer’s checklist for good content” Figma asset, for initiatives where Product Designers handle content design autonomously.
We’ve also identified other levers to help give Product Designers more autonomy. Peer writing sessions and integral Jira quality checklists, to quote a couple.
Collaborate
Along with officially being “designers”, we’re collaborating more and more with Product Designers.
One of our H1 2022 Product Design team goals was to define our operational tasks, so we could better measure the impact we made and the time we spent on them. We joined a task force of Product Designers to create new ticket types in Jira and link time metrics in Tableau. The task force documented our product design workflow in Figma and Notion, giving examples of design practices to use at each stage.
Content Designers now share the same Jira Kanban and ticket types as Product Designers. We’re included in the design workflow from start to finish, on equal footing with Product Designers.
This common language has improved collaboration and communication between Content Designers, Product Designers, and squads.
Check quality
To ensure the best experience for our users, with the least effort for those creating the experiences, we worked with a task force from the Product Design team on a systemic quality criteria initiative.
We defined ten quality criteria to meet in each design iteration. Peer reviews will play a vital role in meeting these quality criteria. We’re happy to report that three of them concern content (comprehension, readability, and accuracy)!
Localize
To reduce localization tasks, freeing up time to concentrate on tasks where we add more value, we started working with external translators. We set up and tracked processes and upskilled Product Designers in translation management.
As localization doesn’t technically come under our scope, our next step was to map out our ideal localization process, identifying existing obstacles and challenges. Our objectives were to pave the way for a potential Localization Manager and to prepare the platform for further internationalization.
We set up share-and-learn meetings with the Learning Content Localization team so we could swap best practices to put in place until there’s a strategic company-wide lead.
We’ve identified several terminology issues linked to localization. We lead research when needed and document less urgent issues for our future Localization Manager.
Our practices
Ritualize
When there were two of us, Hélène and I were able to have impromptu meetings. As a team of three (then four), it was time to introduce new team rituals. We set up a weekly one-hour content design meeting. As we had many subjects to discuss, we iterated by creating guidelines for these meetings:
- Quality time: Share one topic each per meeting
- Useful: Explain your choice of subject and what you expect from the team
- Efficient: Spend fifteen minutes on each subject
- Focused: Don’t work at the same time
We then further iterated by having rolling weekly themes:
- Open your mind: Content design talks/industry news/benchmarks/training
- Think Design System: What’s new? What do we want to update? What do we need? What do we want to share?
- Operational topics: To give visibility on subjects/create bridges/share background and history of current topics
- Evangelization: Invite someone from another team to give visibility, share, and understand their challenges. We recently invited our learning content localization specialists, for example.
Guide
Over the last year, we’ve been busy working on our Design System, Classify. We’ve updated the existing content guidelines (notably the vocabulary section) and added new ones (accessibility & inclusivity, translation glossary, emails).
We’ve also made our mark on the UI guidelines in Classify, adding content guidelines for the most important components (buttons, input fields, dialogs, snackbars, errors, onboarding).
For both the content and UI guidelines, we followed design thinking methods, researching, designing, testing, then publishing and communicating.
We also collaborated on the Marketing Design System initiative. To improve our productivity and the scalability of marketing pages, our DesignOps squad is creating modular design components and templates. Our contribution included suggesting variants, improving component instructions and descriptions, and creating copywriting guidelines.
As we’ve made some great progress, we’ve decided to pause work on our guidelines for the moment and to focus on more strategic high-impact subjects.
Upskill
Making education accessible is OpenClassrooms’ pole star so lifelong learning is high on our team priorities. Our team uses Improvement Days to upskill, using OpenClassrooms’ training programs naturally! Current training topics include harnessing data, user testing and research, and Figma.
After updating our content design skill grid criteria, we held a workshop with Audrey Hacq, our Product Design Manager, to determine where each team member was on the skill grid and where we needed to upskill. Check out Audrey’s article for more info on skill grids!
We used this skill grid to update our job ad, recruitment score card, and case study to represent the work we do more closely. We’re more than ready to scale the team, add another string to our bow, and become a quintet! Keep an eye on our recruitment page for upcoming content design opportunities.
Make plans
For the second half of this year, thanks to a priority matrix workshop, we’ve identified several topics to prioritize on our content design roadmap:
- Voice & tones: Work on guidelines following a branding update.
- Content measurement: Systematize testing content and harnessing data.
- Single source of truth for vocabulary: Merge cross-company glossaries and terminology.
- Content design training in squads: Organize, create, and host practical training sessions.
- Content design in design iteration templates: Use the template to document our work and further improve collaboration with Product Designers.
- Localization process improvements: Put in place best practices, share our ideal process with, and identify allies in, the wider Technology team.
- Follow-up content design survey: Measure impact of awareness initiatives, upskilling, self-service tools, process improvements, and priority framework.
We’re moving onwards and upwards, testing and learning as we go! Want to know how we get on and what we get up to next? Tune in next year, same time, same place!
Shout out to Morgane Constant, Helen Frith and Hélène Legendre for co-creating this article. Thanks to Audrey Hacq for precious feedback.
