Banque des Territoires: a teacher portal useful all the way into the classroom

The client

Created in 2018, Banque des Territoires is one of the five business lines of Caisse des Dépôts. It brings together advisory and financing expertise for local stakeholders within a single structure, to support them in carrying out their projects.

Every two years, the Académie de Paris runs a survey of secondary-school teachers on their use of digital tools. The 2022 survey notably highlighted a significant increase, of more than 20 percentage points, in posting lessons online. This practice makes work outside the classroom easier for students. This finding underlines the value of understanding teachers’ needs around digital tools.

Although the platform is already operational, the TNE initiative suffers from a lack of communication and the information reaches teachers in patchy ways. On top of that, even though some teachers create an account, they don’t use the digital portal on an ongoing basis. The goal of this study is to understand the obstacles to using the digital portal from the teachers’ point of view. To identify them precisely, and to put forward design solutions to overcome them.

To address these objectives, we use three methods:

1. The audit
2. Remote user testing
3. And the co-design workshop.

By combining a usability audit and user testing, we quickly identified critical problems and gathered direct feedback on how teachers use the platform. The audit revealed notable weaknesses, such as the absence of a breadcrumb, the presence of unnecessary steps, and difficulties with dynamic elements. We paid particular attention to these points during the tests. The tests with the users not only confirmed these problems but also brought to light the frustrations tied to them. Things like the lack of clarity on the TNE initiative, the uncertainty about the effort required, and the confusion around how resources are organised. Through this combined approach, we were able to prioritise the problems with the greatest impact on teachers and propose adjustments to simplify the user journey and improve the understanding of the key features.

Cross-referencing the audits with the tests, we conclude that 2 points are priorities in creating an experience that better meets teachers’ expectations:

With these results in hand, we were able to move to the next stage of our engagement: the co-design workshop. The lessons learnt guided the creation of wireframes better suited to the different stages of interaction with the platform. For the platform-discovery workstream, the chosen approach was to surface content higher in the site structure, to provide a clear explanation of how it works right at the top of the home page. For getting hold of resources, the goal was to categorise each resource against several criteria and to make these criteria visible right from the start of the search. Finally, it was necessary to clarify how the ideas of individual solutions and solution packs fit together, for better understanding and navigation.

The engagement wraps up with these suggestions being passed on to Canopée, a training organisation in partnership with the Ministry. They are in charge of operating and publishing the Territoires Numériques Éducatifs digital portal.