Web Factory: FranceAgriMer launches its new website with support from Sully

FranceAgriMer is a public institution under the Ministry of Agriculture. We have four main missions:

• Paying European and national subsidies to farmers and fishermen.
• Collecting, analyzing, and disseminating economic data.
• Organizing dialogue with the French agriculture and fishing industries.
• Supporting exporters and the internationalization of these industries.

www.franceagrimer.fr is the platform that allows professionals and other users to access services and information related to our missions. It is our main communication tool, with more than 60,000 visits and 15,000 downloads per month.
The redesign aimed to reconcile user expectations, the communication needs of each department, and technical constraints and possibilities. We therefore had three main objectives:

• To reorganize and streamline our content.
• To provide smooth and intuitive navigation, redesigned to meet the expectations of our users, with a new design in line with the government's guidelines.
• To implement a new CMS to facilitate our contribution.

The Information Systems department led this major operation for our institution, with support from the Communications department and the Sully Group teams. We structured this project into three main phases: an audit, the design phase, and then the development of the site.

Dacia: The audit, conducted by the Sully design teams, confirmed what we had suspected: an inefficient search engine and too many documents stored on the site. 

Aline: It also quickly became apparent that the site lacked overall usability and that its semantics were poorly understood by users, with terms that were more relevant to the business than to the users!  On the back-office side, our content management system was complex. It made the work of publishing more difficult for management.

Aline: FranceAgriMer fulfills many different types of missions. Designing this new website required the involvement of all departments. Every week, co-design workshops helped us understand the needs of the different professions. The difficulty was taking into account expectations that sometimes diverged! We challenged each of the business needs to meet the main objective, which was to improve usability and navigation for users.

Dacia: The challenge was indeed to stay focused on the needs of the site's users, whether they were professionals, students, journalists, etc. In total, 21 workshops were co-hosted by SCOM, SI, and the Sully Group's UX division to survey our business departments.

Dacia: A significant part of the project involved reviewing content. A rigorous sorting operation on the document collection led us to identify duplicates, obsolete, irrelevant, or unused documents, resulting in the retention of only 3,000 files out of 30,000, thus reducing the volume by 90%. 
We also reclassified each document by sector, theme, content type, etc., and added metadata useful for the search engine.

Aline: This work, carried out with the business departments, enabled us to define rules of use (detailed in the Editorial Charter) and explain the challenge: a lighter site performs better. At the same time, we worked on building the site with an editorial approach that was completely different from that of the previous site.

Aline: The user experience was the common thread: how could we provide quick and intuitive access to the information our users were looking for? Based on this principle, we redesigned the organization of the content. We defined the page layouts, again in co-design workshops with Sully's designers and the business teams. Next, the IT and SCOM departments were asked how each button on each page should respond. Finally, a “test site” was used to test the various features and improve any aspects that could not be anticipated.

Dacia: The new content management system, based on the open source Drupal platform, is also designed to make online services more accessible to people with disabilities.

The launch of the new website has been a success! It is the culmination of two years of collaborative work. Thank you to the teams at FranceAgriMer, to our managers for their support, and to the teams at Sully Group for their professionalism, guidance, and patience.
Sully has been invaluable throughout the process, providing solutions and technical, ergonomic, and functional advice.