Laying the foundations of UX writing at OpenClassrooms.
Brand new start
So, here we are, fifteen months after arriving at OpenClassrooms right at the start of lockdowns in France. It’s been a whirlwind year that’s seen OpenClassrooms grow from strength to strength, gaining B Corp and Great Place to Work status, culminating in a recent fundraiser of $80M. 🔥
How did we get here, I hear you ask. As OpenClassrooms grew, and more and more product squads saw the light of day, we were hired to help define the vision for content. We joined the Product Design team, already made up of a Product Design Director, one User Researcher, and four Product Designers (there are now eleven of us!)
Did you notice I’m using the third person? No, it’s not the royal “we”. There are currently two of us on the UX writing team. My partner in crime, Hélène Legendre, and I form the Bert & Ernie, Simon & Garfunkel, Carrie & Mr. Big (maybe not the last one) of UX Writers.
Our mission is to help people access education by guiding them across a seamless user experience. We do this through clear, consistent, and concise content creation.
Manic Mondays
On top of getting to know the product and a whole host of tools, processes, and ceremonies (multiplied by the number of squads we cover), there was more than enough for us to get our teeth into, writing microcopy and product copy for six squads and managing strings and keys on our translation management platform, Phrase.
Our Product Design team and the Tech and Product teams in general were (and still are) adorable and organized several meetings to get us up to speed. Despite the remote onboarding, the team spirit shone through. Since our arrival, several more company-wide initiatives have been put in place such as onboarding checklists and buddy systems. I could talk a lot more about such initiatives at OpenClassrooms, but I digress (and my co-workers have done it so eloquently here and here.)
As we’re both bilingual, we were charged with writing content for all platform projects in both platform languages (English and French). This meant we effectively covered all squads since we had to know the context of everything we translated. And, right from day one, we were inundated with copywriting, proofreading, translation, terminology, and glossary requests from teams right across the company.
We recognized an urgent need to carve out time to work on documentation, evangelization, and process improvement. Of course, in true Design Thinking style, we did this with precious feedback from our Product Design manager, Audrey Hacq, our CTO, Romain Kuzniak, and all of our talented Product Design team 🧠
We can work it out
We let everyone in the company know what UX Writers do (and don’t do), with pages in Notion covering:
- Definition of UX writing
- Difference between UX writing and copywriting
- Our scope and priorities
- Types of tasks and time estimates
We then set about defining the UX writing process. We created a Jira Kanban board with a dedicated UX writing workflow.
Next, we analyzed the types of requests we were receiving, gathered briefing documents from other teams, and created UX writing and copywriting brief templates as well as localization and proofreading processes.
An essential and ongoing task on our UX writing roadmap is improving current (or non-existent) processes. We started by looking at how we worked alone and how we collaborated with our peer UX Writer then moved on to how we worked with Product Designers and all the other members of our squads and the wider Product team. We strive to include UX writing in all relevant strategy and phase docs, and squad workflows.
As it soon became evident that we’d need to expand our team, and OpenClassrooms was growing exponentially, we set about recruiting a third UX Writer. This was the opportunity to create recruitment email templates, first for the Tech team and then for the wider company. We also benched UX writing salaries, set up the internal UX Writer competency grid, improved the job ad and case study, and built a pool of interview questions.
A major pain point was working with the Bermuda triangle of Figma, Google Sheet, and Phrase. Let me explain my choice of words. Working with both a Figma file and a Google Sheet increased the risk of error and doubled our work. Plus, if Product Designers made updates to the design, we had to make sure they were updated in the Google Sheet. To make matters worse, we had to split copy into branches corresponding to our front-end developers’ tickets. We had up to 13 separate branches to create, sometimes with only one key per branch, and couldn’t upload them until the developers’ tickets were ready. There was often a long wait before we could move a project to the “Done” column in Jira.
We set about benchmarking and testing Figma plugins that would allow us to kill off the Google Sheet step. We needed one that could handle branches and were lucky that Phrase was busy building just that. Our new workflow is in its infancy but, hopefully, will save us an enormous amount of time, especially as our lovely Product Designers have agreed to name string keys 🙏
To cope with the frequent requests, we outsourced proofreading to Ritza’s copy-editing platform and are currently trialing externalizing translations using the Jobs feature in Phrase. We’re also collaborating with the Learning content team for localization. In addition, a RACI for emails at OpenClassrooms helped us to define those whose creation shouldn’t be our responsibility.
As squads were being added and it would be impossible for us to be involved in all product content, the answer was to upskill our colleagues. We set up Office Hours slots for bite-size, real-time UX writing reviews.
We got started on our content guidelines, to upskill and to ensure consistency. This is a colossal undertaking, so we broke it down into digestible chunks. We collated existing cross-company guidelines, benchmarked other style guides, and worked on the information architecture. We recently published our UX writing principles, grammar & mechanics, quality criteria, word list, and actionable language sections in Classify, our design system, and are in the process of gathering feedback. We’ve made them public so check them out and tell us what you think!
Other achievements include setting up a glossary workflow and a content legacy improvement process and defining our squad’s primary languages. Hélène even found time to speak at industry meetups and record UX writing podcasts! 💪
The introduction of fortnightly product improvement days made a huge difference, freeing up time to concentrate on UX writing roadmap topics. Marie-Anne Chaloupecky’s UX writing audit gave us invaluable and practical advice plus the impetus to move forward. Professional meetups, articles, newsletters, and Slack groups have also proved precious sources of info.
The only way is up
As I write, our new senior UX Writer, Morgane Constant, is joining the ride. There’s a whole lot more to come: Guideline-wise, we’re adding content to components, accessibility & inclusivity sections, and a translation glossary. We’re collaborating on OpenClassrooms’ brand book, brand persona, and voice and tones. We aim to get more involved in user research and testing, leveraging data, and measuring the impact of our copy.
We’ll continue to evangelize UX writing internally and externally, improve legacy content, create an iteration template that’s specific to UX writing, and scale the UX writing team!
It’s been an equally challenging and rewarding roller-coaster. Here’s to the next fifteen months and more. To infinity and beyond! 🚀
Sounds like your cup of tea? Check out our open positions!
