France Travail has prioritized user experience by establishing a UX Factory and collaborating with Inetum to enhance its digital services, focusing on user-centered design and measurable improvements to meet the needs of job seekers and internal teams.
France Travail puts UX at the heart of its strategy with its UX Factory and support from Inetum.
With more than five-hundred digital products, France Travail has made UX a cornerstone of its product strategy and, in 2017, created the UX Factory, a resource center dedicated to designing user-centered services. Following its internal success, the organization strengthened its resources, notably by drawing on the expertise of Inetum’s Experience Design Studio, which came to support internal teams. Together, they are helping make UX an everyday reflex.
What if we listened first to those who use public services before designing them? That is the approach France Travail adopted in rethinking its digital services. The organization decided to make user experience an even more structured, measurable discipline; and above all, one that’s shared on a wide scale. This is a profound transformation that now affects both job seekers and internal teams.
Putting the User Truly at the Center
UX (short for User Experience) refers to the entire range of emotions, intuitions, efforts, and feelings a person experiences when interacting with a service or product. It is not just a matter of design or ergonomics. It is a methodology based on a simple idea: starting from real use cases, people’s everyday lives, their needs, and their irritations, and adjusting accordingly. For France Travail, this way of thinking has become central. “Since January 1st, 2024, our new general manager has placed user experience at the heart of our product strategy,” explained Violaine Boisseau, head of the UX Factory at the IT department. “The UX Factory has seen a flood of internal teams seeking support. But we were not staffed to keep up with so many products.”
Reinforced Support
To support this momentum, France Travail has recruited internally and also brought in experts from Inetum’s Experience Design studio. What’s Inetum’s approach? A team of specialists made up of UX researchers, product designers, UX writers, and strategists. Able to cover the full spectrum from product vision to interface microcopy, they provide an external perspective and complementary skills. “Our role is to help make everything fluid, understandable, jargon-free, and useful. This means running impact mapping workshops, conducting user research protocols in the field—such as agency interviews or quantitative surveys—as well as analyzing behavioral data to inform decisions,” explained Amélie Lemaire, Head of Design at Inetum.
What’s at stake today goes beyond just providing support. “The key is to ensure that the user’s voice becomes a cornerstone in decision-making for every product. That is not yet the case everywhere, but we are working on it. Working with Inetum also gives us the opportunity to gain an external perspective, a mirror effect for our internal teams. Being challenged on our practices is invaluable, it helps us move forward and break out of our routine. In addition, Inetum brings skills we have not fully developed in-house yet, like everything related to marketing strategy and UX writing.” The ambition? To create a virtuous cycle i.e., train product teams, set indicators from the outset, and systematically measure the impact of improvements.
Tangible Results
To date, more than 280 products have received support from the UX Factory. The feedback has been highly positive, with an internal satisfaction rating of 4.5 out of 5. Data and user feedback show a notable improvement in user journeys and a better fit with public needs. “With each intervention, we conduct a satisfaction survey to determine if the deliverables were useful and if the approach was appropriate. The feedback is overwhelmingly positive,” praised Violaine Boisseau. But the impact doesn’t stop there. “What we’re seeing is that the arrival of a UX specialist in a product team truly enhances the experience for end users,” she emphasized. “Even though this approach isn’t yet applied to all digital services in the France Travail ecosystem, there’s a clear desire to accelerate!”
