Website user experience: best practices 2023 and interview with Pôle Emploi

How to Improve User Experience on Websites? What are the Current Best Practices?

We had the opportunity to speak with Pôle Emploi for the CX Circle podcast. Olivier PELVOIZIN, Director of Digital, User Experience, and Open Innovation, shared his feedback on the digital transformation of this public sector giant. Multi-site strategies, user data—discover more in this article.

But just before that, we're sharing the 2023 best practices. Read on to learn more.

2023 Best Practices for Successful Website User Experience

Best Practice 1: Simple and Effective Pages

One sentence = one piece of information. This is a well-known writing tip, yet it's incredibly useful for user experience. Don't overwhelm your user with long sentences; you're not Baudelaire... Your user is looking for information on your site; they want to be reassured. But users are also impatient; they want quick and easy access to information. Focusing on short, simple sentences is a good way to convey a message clearly and quickly.

For CTAs (Call to Actions), it's the same. Keep it short and simple (you see, we didn't say "basic" #orelsan). Be careful not to fall into the trap of being too simple. Two things: have an action verb in your buttons, but also remember to specify the request. For example, don't just say "search" but rather "find a job" on a recruitment site. On a travel site, don't say "search" but "find the best flight." This way, you're already guiding the user to the next step of their journey by slightly anticipating their click.

Best Practice 2: Web Performance for Better SEO

"Rage quit" is used when a sports or video game player is too angry to continue playing and usually quits the game or match before it ends. The player might then throw or hit their controller or keyboard in response to their "rage," to the point of breaking it and rendering it unusable. Well... your users might not be there yet. But it's time to check if your site's loading speed meets Google's guidelines. The better you're rated by Google, the better your SEO will be. The more your users appreciate you, the more they'll return to your site, the more traffic you'll get, the better your SEO will be. It's as simple as that! Now, let's get practical: how can you improve your page loading speed? Check out our blog article to find out!

Best Practice 3: Accessibility and Design to Improve Your Website's User Experience

Other elements considered by search engines, as well as by your users, are accessibility and design. These two points go hand in hand, as accessibility aims to make desired information accessible to ALL. This means taking into account visually impaired people, colorblind people, elderly people, etc.

For example, on the Contentsquare menu, we worked with digital accessibility experts to create a menu adapted for everyone. Even some things your users don't see are important: properly naming links, optimizing your anchor texts, renaming the alt tags of your images. These are elements that Google's robots take into account.

Interview with Pôle Emploi on Their Website User Experience Strategy

Pôle Emploi is one of the public sector players with numerous projects focused on digital transformation. We spoke with Olivier PELVOIZIN, Director of Digital, User Experience, and Open Innovation at Pôle Emploi France, during our CX Circle podcast about website user experience.

W.C.: What are your main digital challenges? O.P.: Digital was initiated, as in many organizations, to simplify and to absorb some of the flows and workloads previously handled by advisors. But gradually, we really saw the value and impact of personalization, and increasingly, simplification. And today, for us, digital has several ambitions:

• A 24/7 service: The very first is to enable almost all online procedures in a continuous configuration. We don't ask the user to know all the tools or devices, but rather, as they search and evolve, to suggest the right service at the right time.

• Personalization: The idea is that tomorrow, your homepage, your user journey will resemble you. We've started doing this, and we see great added value, which saves a lot of time.

• User experience: Marketing data corresponds to the observation of digital uses, seeing what works, and understanding behaviors.

W.C.: What is the role of data in all this? O.P.: Data, as for all players today, depends on those who consent to cookies and accept them. And that's a first key panel. The second panel is linked to annual quality assurance campaigns involving observers, customer observations, and user observations, which allow us, with fixed, regular barometers, to compare what's comparable and to see major trends.

W.C.: Before the on-site user experience, you have to "catch" your users. Is SEO important for you? O.P.: We observe it in the behaviors of our users related to search engines, but I think it's transposable to many sectors of activity. The brand is no longer really the driver of a user's search; it's the keyword that interests them. Typically, they will rather type "developer job offers" than "Pôle emploi job offers website." They will go for what they are looking for, and the engine must manage to propose solutions. So we are very careful about these subjects, and it has really become an art or a sensitive supervision to be well-referenced with the right words to be found by these search engines. But we are always very attentive to what is being done, and so we have launched these broad concepts: data, qualitative observation at regular intervals, web observation, and of course, I forgot everything related to field observation, everything related to user feedback from our agencies, field feedback from dedicated observations, guerrilla testing, user groups, witnesses. We travel a lot to the provinces to get in touch with users and understand what works or doesn't. Especially for our new services. Those that are growing and that we are testing today.

W.C.: Can you introduce your different websites and how you manage all these sites with your teams? O.P.: Well, I'll present the main ones because we have the "big five," but also test sites from the Pôle Emploi incubator.

• pole-emploi.fr: around 40 million visits per month. For individuals and professionals. It's a responsive website, and we insist on that because I'm discovering more and more partners who don't have a responsive web solution.

• The two small challengers to pole-emploi.fr are two applications: Mon Espace and the Mes Offres application together now gather almost as many monthly visits as the website.

• Emploi Store: created six years ago. A reference marketplace for service quality, open to the private sector, and allows for disconnecting from the somewhat commercial and mercantile rules of traditional search engines.

• The Ma Formation application, which is a bit lower than the previous two, reaching around 300,000 visitors per month compared to millions for the others. It's dedicated to users who want to retrain, change careers, or get trained.

W.C.: What project are you most proud of in terms of website user experience? O.P.: A few years ago, we developed a predictive algorithm for recruiting companies. It's called "la bonne boîte" (the good company). We had enough data to predict which companies were recruiting. But it's like Coca-Cola; we won't give you the recipe—it's ours 😉 It has an 87% success rate, meaning that the companies we suggest will recruit in almost nine out of ten cases. They will really recruit within six months, and you won't have made a spontaneous application for nothing.

W.C.: How are your teams organized to manage all these sites and projects? O.P.: First, this work goes beyond my teams because to create, develop, and sustain websites, it requires a real orchestral effort involving many other departments. So there are three departments: one dedicated to the online user vision. So I understand, I listen to the user, I create mappings, I try to provide perspectives and foresight. I have another open innovation department that is constantly in import-export mode with its private and public ecosystem. We have a dedicated site called Pôle emploi.io. It's the same as .fr. And you have an interface reserved for innovation professionals in digital experience to come and get APIs, widgets, learning via Pôle emploi, data learning, and vice versa. The last department, incubator, scale-up, develops and consolidates Pôle emploi's main digital services.

W.C.: How do you explain being one of the most advanced players in your sector in terms of digital transformation? O.P.: I think that in the history of Pôle Emploi, there is no major transformation without leaders who have this vision and energy to transform their institution. I believe that the Director General, Jean Bassères, instilled very strong energy on the subject and transformed the digital trajectory of our institution. My predecessors opened up a great path. I think that was the hardest part for them because they had to start and launch this huge wheel. I am only accompanying this dynamic, but by integrating some of my own sensitivities, stemming from the network. That is, giving field professionals, our advisors, the ability to interact with these developments, to understand them, to promote them, is very important to me. And I think we need to be more eco-responsible and have a more long-term strategy. The interest and relevance of a new service, the size of an application, the given storage volumes, how today we develop new services compatible with their IT environments and that do not duplicate data. One might think it's a small step, but these are small actions, one next to the other, that can make a difference.

W.C.: What are the digital specificities of the sector, in your opinion? O.P.: They are numerous. We are here to develop services that are useful, usable, and used by our users. Our priorities will also include reducing tensions in the labor market and developing and improving pathways to streamline the matching between supply and demand. Want to know more? A concrete example? Discover the rest of the podcast on the Spotify channel.