Week one: two apps, not one
The first decision was the one that shaped everything after: two applications, not one with a switch. Néo sits behind the utility's single sign-on and is for its staff; the participatory budget is public and asks for no account. Same product, two instances, two back offices with a link between them. It cost a second deployment and saved every later conversation about who may see what.
The second was to keep the form builder pragmatic, an ordered list of fields per challenge or per edition, frozen the moment someone submits, rather than build the drag-and-drop editor first. The editors got their forms in week three; the editor is on the roadmap.
What the mock-up rounds changed
Two rounds of screens with the utility's team, before the real pages were styled. The first fixed the vocabulary: 'défi' not 'campagne', 'lauréat' not 'gagnant', the four steps of the budget in the utility's own words. The second found what the model was missing: the challenges had no page of their own, an idea could not be edited by its author, the winners had no follow-up screen. Those became the round-two pages.
The design system came out of the same rounds: one typeface chosen for legibility, contrasts and keyboard paths checked before colour was discussed, and the whole thing single-sourced so the two apps cannot drift apart.
What is left
The single sign-on with the utility's directory, which waits on their side; the historical content, imported from the previous tools; the accessibility statement, after the audit. The opening is January 2027 and the platforms are being deployed now, with the utility's editors trained on the console. The part that mattered most is already true: the words on every page are theirs, changed by them, without a ticket to us.