Feedback on the launch of the redesigned cereq.fr website

Céreq

The Centre for Studies and Research on Qualifications is a French public administrative institution that conducts studies in the fields of the labor market, qualifications, and professional training. 

The Project

Cereq had a website based on EZPublish. The shift in the CMS community towards a basic free and open version and a more advanced paid solution convinced the Cereq teams to redesign their web platform. In its response to the public tender, the bluedrop.fr agency proposed to use the Drupal 8 CMS, the search engine powered by Apache SolR, while ensuring the migration of content from the old EZPublish site to Drupal. This ambitious redesign project required many months of collaborative work and involved all of our agency's design services.

Main project challenges:

• Cereq chose to keep its graphic charter. The UX and UI design process had to be carried out taking this constraint into account: to modernize and improve without a complete overhaul.
• Even before the redesign, the Cereq website already featured high-quality and abundant content. One of the major challenges was to focus efforts on search, in order to speed up content access.
• The project imposed significant constraints regarding accessibility.
• The need for research into the user experience (UX) was expressed—a special focus was placed on conducting these workshops.

UX Design

The first workshops, held between the project teams at Cereq and the bluedrop.fr agency, resulted in the first prototypes, the outcome of a Design Studio workshop. These prototypes were presented to users. 

Feedback from user testing helped refine user journeys, especially regarding nomenclature and behaviors. The naming of certain sections was also changed at this stage. The “Collections” became Cereq’s “Publications”; the “Video Library” was replaced by an interface blending different resource types with information displayed on hover.

In parallel with user journeys, we placed emphasis on search. The sheer volume of content made it necessary to offer an effective, clear, and user-friendly search tool.

Technical Framework - Drupal 8

We developed the platform with Drupal 8.
Particular effort was devoted to: 

• Search using the Search API module—which enables advanced search with Solr, combined with the Facets module, providing dynamic filters to refine searches. Substantial work was also done to provide synonym functionality for search auto-completion (module Synonyms).
• The events calendar with the Calendar module—and the display of event types in color (according to taxonomy terms and content type).
• The glossary with the Glossify module—which provides filters to link content elements to other pages. A tooltip is used by taxonomy, linking the term to its explanatory page.
• Importing content from the former EZPublish site—using Feeds and migrate modules.
• Advanced paragraph management—the Paragraphs module.

We thank the Cereq project team for their dedication, both personally and professionally. Thanks to Marion for her work, Ryad for the UIX section, and the development team: Lara, Rouaida, Ahmad, Elie N!!

The bluedrop.fr agency has provided preventative, corrective, and evolving maintenance for the project since its launch.

The site: https://www.cereq.fr
Production launch: 09/10/2019.
See the case study.

Testimonial - Michel Stoesz - Project Manager