Product Design template: when the process becomes the tool
The one tool we use to document our design process, communicate our progress, and share our work
In the Product Design team of OpenClassrooms, we successfully introduced a way of sharing the same process, while customizing it to each Product Designer’s needs. Here’s how!
Where did we start?
A situation that may sound familiar to you.
First, a quick explanation of how things work in the design team of OpenClassrooms:
On a daily basis, we work with our squad developers, Product Manager (PM), Product Owner (PO), UX Writer and Quality Engineer.
But we also try to exchange a lot, and share as much as we can between designers.
Back in 2020, end of year, we were 5 product designers, distributed in different squads.
While the year 2020 has been hectic for everybody, forcing us all to adapt to fully remote work, it has also been a fast-growing year for EdTech in general, and OpenClassrooms in particular.
So here we were at the end of 2020, 5 product designers working on different subjects, geographically distant, and about to welcome more and more new designers to follow the growth of our company.
A lack of alignment
As we exchanged on our subjects, we realized that, despite having a multi-talented design team, able to use a lot of different tools and methodologies and eager to push the quality of our design work to the maximum, we were lacking alignment and common methods.
As designers, we all have our own processes to design our solutions and then communicate them. We had some documentation, but not a single written reference to follow a process and share our work in a harmonized way.
We were also missing the opportunity to share our best practices among the design team, and were losing some historic on past functionalities: “Why did we choose option A over option B?”
We needed a common written process, that any team member could refer to or easily onboard with.
A need for a new template
We learnt from past mistakes, that in order to be really efficient, this process had to be fully integrated into our workflow, and not just documented somewhere.
We already had a template for our design process on Confluence, but not always well-used. It wasn’t comprehensive and a lot of tasks were still done outside of it.
Still, our squads were using Confluence to document everything: business goals, KPIs, technical analyses… So Confluence templates remained the starting point.
Creating the template
What did the designers expect from this new template?
Before starting to create the new template, I took the time to interview the designers to find out what was working or not in their current process, and what they were lacking.
After that, I knew that we needed our new template to:
- centralize everything: having all their work gathered in one place, and in the same place as the rest of the squad is super efficient.
- guide every type of designer profile: depending on the designer seniority, years of experience in the company or designer background, they sometimes need to be guided on some steps.
- …but not too strictly: designers work on a lot of different features. Depending on the subject they’re working on, they won’t always use the same steps in the design process.
- be self-explanatory: this template would be the single source of truth for documenting our process and presenting it to newcomers. Anybody could take it and use it right away, understanding how we design at OpenClassrooms.
How could we make this template even more useful than just for designers?
The idea with this template was also to improve the way we shared our work, to the squad and to the stakeholders.
So the template could also be a place:
- for PMs/POs: to understand where the designers are in their process, how much time they have left, to be able to organize the squad work
- for stakeholders: to understand the process behind the solution, and the whys of the decisions.
The solution: building a template as a “toolbox”, where the designer can choose their tools, use them and present the results, all of that in one place.
How does it work?
We open-sourced our template in our public Confluence space, so you can check and explore it while reading what’s next!
It’s a toolbox
We started from the classical steps of the Design Thinking methodology and, for each step, we detailed all the different tasks that could be useful for a design project at OpenClassrooms.
Each of this task is represented by a colored block in the template.
For each step, in the “more details” section, we gathered useful resources to do this task: tools, templates, link to internal trainings, link to best practices…
The idea is that no matter our level or our expertise, we can be guided through every step by this template.
It’s a *modular* toolbox :
Of course, we won’t use all these steps for each project that we’ll work on. The best thing about this template is that we can adjust it to our needs.
- Some steps remain mandatory because they are necessary to what we believe is a good quality design project here at OpenClassrooms. We are not supposed to remove them.
- But the others are optional and can be removed: when starting a project and importing the template, we can delete the steps that will be useless for our project, with their associated “more details” section.
We only keep the ones adapted to our project.
Once we cleaned the steps, we may have a much smaller page, but we have:
- a glance at all the steps we’ll need to go through, especially the ones we’ll need to prepare.
- an idea of the time we’ll need to finish the project, and thus an estimation of our delivery date.
It’s also a guide for best practices and common ways of working
At any time, we can improve our Confluence template by adding new best practices or template for a specific section, so we stay aligned on what we’re supposed to deliver for each step.
It can also be a communication tool
We use a color code to communicate on our status: when a step is done, the block panel becomes green.
We also use this block panel to write the conclusion of the step and explain the design decisions we took at this point. Other notes and details can go in the more details section:
People who will read the document will know:
- where we’re at in one glance: super useful for our PM, PO and other members of the squad.
- why we took which decision in our design: super useful for stakeholders.
Here is what it could look like as a designer is working on a feature:
After a few months of usage…
We’ve been using this template for a few months now, and it has brought a lot to the team so far:
- We are able to standardize what already works, with shared tools and methodologies.
- We centralized our best practices and tips right in the tool that we’re using on a daily basis, which saves us a lot of time. (no separate documents, no forgotten checklists…).
- In the same place, we also have the history of our tasks: what we learnt at each step, and which decisions we took. It helps us keep track of our design decisions and explain more easily our choices.
- It has been also much easier to onboard new designers on our process, no matter their level of expertise: with a small-scope task and the document, the learning curve of “how we work here” was very fast.
On top of that, this template is a part of our continuous improvement philosophy, and our willingness to share knowledge: if we want to add a section, update a practice or add new details, we can do so very easily and everybody will benefit.
In the design team, we all have different expertises in the UX/UI spectrum and we’ve implemented a lot of opportunities to share that within our team (masterclasses, tutorials, templates for example). This template is for us a way of leveraging all this knowledge.
Our goal is now to keep completing our template with our future videos, best practices, tips…
So, if you have some feedback or ideas, don’t hesitate to share!
Do you want to give it a try?
We open-sourced our template in our public Confluence space.
You can copy/paste all the content of this template in your own Confluence space and customize it to make it yours.
Don’t hesitate to share your usage and best practices!
More about OpenClassrooms
If you want to learn more about how we work at OpenClassrooms, don’t hesitate to listen to the interview of our Design Director Audrey Hacq in the podcast Design Journeys (in French), or her article about her role as a Product Design Director (in English).
We are hiring! Check our current job openings.
Thank you to Audrey Hacq, Hélène Legendre, Louise Thurlwell, Catherine Vallet and Romain Kuzniak for their proofreadings!
