ODS OVHcloud Design system

OVHcloud has several products and interfaces serving different uses and contexts.

Within the Product Design Core Team, I work on ODS (OVHcloud Design System), the Design System intended to ensure consistency, quality and reusability across OVHcloud experiences.

My role covers the governance and evolution of the Design System, from designing components and patterns through to their documentation and adoption by Product Design teams.

With 55 components and 11 recipes used across OVHcloud’s products, the Design System needs to enable consistent experiences while addressing very different product contexts.

Its open-source nature adds a particular constraint: components and their usage rules need to be understandable and usable without relying solely on the teams’ internal knowledge.

The main challenges are therefore to maintain a consistent, documented, accessible and evolving system, while supporting its adoption by around fifteen Product Designers and incorporating new needs from the products.

My role goes beyond designing components: I work across their lifecycle, from identifying needs to design, defining usage rules, documentation, adoption and the evolution of the system.

Joining the team was an opportunity to use Product Designers’ actual practices as a starting point to improve the Design System and the way it works.

Starting with designers’ needs

I interviewed Product Designers to understand how they use the Design System, identify their needs and uncover the main pain points. These conversations turned feedback from day-to-day use into identified and prioritised needs, then informed a roadmap for the Design System’s evolution.

Evolving the Figma library

Insights from the interviews informed a redesign of the Figma components to better meet designers’ needs and make them easier to use every day. The goal was to evolve the library based on a structured, prioritised view of the changes needed, rather than only responding to one-off requests.

Rethinking the Design System workflow

A new workflow was introduced between Product Designers and the Design System team. Designers now have a dedicated contact to share their needs and contribute to the system’s evolution, without having to build components themselves. This distributes responsibilities more effectively and strengthens the Design System’s consistency.

Documentation that supports decisions

The Figma documentation was reworked to go beyond describing components and help designers choose the right solution for their context. For example, a Badge vs. Tag comparison table makes their differences and respective use cases easy to identify. Documentation becomes a practical design decision tool, directly available in the environment where designers work.

A collection of assets, guidelines and UI components for building consistent user experiences across OVHcloud products.

Explore the Design System on Storybook