How OpenClassrooms uses zeroheight to serve user needs and impact revenue

In 2020, OpenClassrooms had a huge boom in students. With a global pandemic forcing millions into their homes, people had time to earn diplomas and learn the new skills necessary to change their careers. At the same time, the US Department of Labor recognized them as a Registered Apprenticeship.

With so much happening, the company needed to grow quite a bit.

The design team alone moved from a scrappy team of seven to a group of more than 20 accomplished designers.

Now that everyone is in place, the goals shifted from an intense focus on student acquisition to ensuring that every OpenClassrooms student reached their full potential. And to achieve that goal, OpenClassrooms adopted Classify, their design system built in zeroheight.

The design system helped the company operate effectively and efficiently while creating a product that users absolutely adore. It’s a bonus that the design system has also made the team at OpenClassrooms a bit happier, too.

Ensuring we’re building the right thing

With a large set of new users, the design team as a whole focused on user research. Audrey Hacq, Product Design Director at Open Classrooms, described, “We are trying to contribute to aggressive revenue goals by making sure the company can make relevant decisions based on user needs.”

The design team conducted tons of research to determine how to best serve users. Once they compiled their research, the design system became a repository of best practices to ensure best practices were followed. Audrey continues:

Classify is about how we build the solution.

For OpenClassrooms, building the right product starts with creating the right components. The team ensures that components are checked for usability and accessibility.

Developers on the team use zeroheight’s Storybook integration to contribute easily. Christophe de Canteloube, Staff Frontend Engineer at OpenClassrooms explains, “All developers contribute to the design system.” Ultimately, the embedded stories offer clear guidelines ensuring everyone builds a quality product. Christophe continues, “developers use zeroheight and Storybook to follow the guidelines.”

With the product team working together to create a single source of truth, every OpenClassrooms student benefits.

Audrey explains, “Classify serves our [end] users by helping us build accessible, robust, and qualitative components.”

Connecting Design and Development Teams

Before the OpenClassrooms team was ready to create a robust component library, they needed to get everyone on the same page.

Christophe de Canteloube explains:

It was important to merge everything into a single source of truth and zeroheight was a good place for that.

These days, Classify is an essential part of the workflow for designers and developers. It houses assets and templates that can be used out of the box or customized to fit specific projects.

Since there’s a common starting place, the entire product team saves time while ensuring the product is accessible and consistent.

And, the team is certain that the design system will pay massive dividends down the road too.

Christophe furthers, “If we want to change something about the design tokens, we don’t need to ask all of the squads to make the change. We have control over the whole application and it’s way faster to fix something or engage in a new brand.”

Measuring the Design System

Audrey is no stranger to measuring design systems. She wrote a whole piece on it.

At OpenClassrooms, they measure their design system in multiple ways.

The team asks developers to provide an Employee Net Promoter Score (eNPS) to measure their current level of satisfaction with the design system. So far, Classify has scored well. Christophe recalls:

We send an eNPS and ask developers to rate their experience from 0 to 10. [Employees have been selecting] between 8 and 9 from the beginning.

And, Designers provide feedback before and after a component is changed. Catherine Vallet, Product Designer at OpenClassrooms, also likes to keep a pulse on everything by talking to the team. One easy way to do that is by observing designers use the design system in real-time. She explains, “I do a lot of one to one’s with designers where I help them create components. It’s really helpful to see how they work.”

And to get even more quantitative, the team built a script to track all of their components. They track the most commonly used components and how many they’ve created.

To date, components are used heavily and there’s no doubt that the investment in a design system transformed the product development cycle.

Transforming Work at OpenClassrooms

Classify is unique – it’s used by multiple teams at OpenClassrooms including the marketing and learning teams.

And, those teams are loving it.

In fact, they enjoy using Classify so much that they’re looking to create their own systems. When Audrey thinks about the future of work at OpenClassrooms she explains, “The systemic mindset will be at all levels. We’ll have a brand system. A video system…it’s great to see that within OpenClassrooms, we influenced the systemic mindset.”

As the product team continues to focus on helping all users maximize their potential, they’re also helping employees do the same.