Estimaction
Leading a project to develop a digital solution offering cities in France an environmental health diagnosis of their territory.
00. Context
This project was part of a French State program (EIG) designed to foster entrepreneurial initiatives within public services. Participants are grouped into small teams and given a set timeframe — 16 months in our case — to develop a solution addressing a specific public issue through an entrepreneurial and user-centered approach.
I was teamed up with a data engineer, and together we worked with the Cerema, a public agency supporting local authorities in sustainable development to tackle the following problem:
How to help cities reduce the health impacts of air and noise pollution caused by car traffic?
Client
French state (DINUM) x Cerema
Team
Jérémie Letonnelier
Marion Caron
My role
I took on the role of founding designer and product lead, overseeing exploratory research to identify user needs, clearly define the problem and align all stakeholders around a shared vision. I shaped the product vision and strategy, designed the MVP, no-coded a landing page, and regularly pitched the project to public partners and institutions.
01. Framing the issue
Research with local authorities and experts (20+ interviews) helped us better understand and reframe the broad problem we had been given.
We discovered that tackling urban pollution and its health impacts usually begins with a territorial diagnosis to identify problem areas and assess their severity. Yet, producing these diagnoses is challenging:
Data is scattered, sometimes outdated, and they rarely incorporate a human-centered perspective.
02. Finding our concept
After presenting the findings from our exploratory research to project stakeholders, I facilitated a collaborative workshop to generate concepts that could directly address the identified challenges.
We evaluated the ideas we came up with based on technical feasibility, user needs, and Cerema's objectives. This process led us to choose the following concept:
A digital dashboard providing a personalized and humanized environmental health diagnosis for each city in France.
03. Defining the MVP
We then presented the concept to local authorities working on urban pollution reduction and refined it based on their input while starting to define our MVP.
Additionally, we developed a collaborative roadmap to collect user feedback and prioritize key features.
04. Designing the solution
I crafted the MVP in Figma, using the French government's design system (DSFR).
05. Results
Despite limited development resources, our concept and MVP quickly validated interest and demand for the initiative. In just a few weeks, we gathered over 120 newsletter subscribers — a promising early sign of engagement.
Presenting the project at major events sparked enthusiastic feedback from professionals and organizations committed to reducing urban pollution. Several public administrations and local authorities even reached out proactively, expressing interest in collaborating and supporting the initiative.
These early outcomes confirmed both the relevance of the problem we were addressing and the potential of our proposed solution, laying a solid foundation for future development opportunities.
06. Personal takeaways
This project gave me the chance to lead the entire product journey — from user research to delivering the final UI of the MVP. It pushed me beyond design into, product strategy, public speaking, project management, content writing, and even no-code development.
It wasn’t without challenges: we were just two, with limited resources and an ambitious scope, working in an environment unfamiliar with user-centered, iterative approaches.
Still, it was an entrepreneurial adventure I truly enjoyed. I'm proud of the concept we defined and the MVP we designed.
