Place des Aînés

Context and Challenges

Finding a suitable facility for a dependent relative is still a difficult journey today. Families often have to consult many sources of information, contact several facilities, compare heterogeneous offers and handle administrative procedures in a context of urgency or heavy emotional strain.

Place des Aînés' ambition was to create far more than a simple directory of facilities. The platform had to become a genuine support tool, able to structure the entire search and introduction journey while retaining a strong human dimension through the involvement of the Place des Aînés advisers.

Running over a total of 5 months, the project was organised in two stages: 6 weeks devoted to architecture, branding and UX/UI design, then 14 weeks dedicated to development. That timeline proved essential to meet the project's main challenges:

• Design a reassuring, accessible user journey for audiences who are sometimes unfamiliar with digital tools.
• Centralise several hundred facilities within a single database.
• Develop a complex business workflow allowing full management of the introductions between families and facilities.
• Create distinct logged-in spaces for families, facilities and internal teams.
• Ensure reliable synchronisation between the public site and the business back-office.
• Allow the Place des Aînés team to steer all operations from a single interface.

Our Approach

1. Research and Strategy

We began with an in-depth immersion phase to understand the stakes of the medico-social sector and the different steps of the admission journey into a facility.

The analysis covered platforms specialising in support for seniors, existing facility directories and the sector's matching solutions. This study allowed us to identify a significant gap: most tools stop at searching for facilities, without genuine support through the decision process.

We therefore defined a product architecture resting on a central principle: place the Place des Aînés team at the heart of the qualification process, to guarantee the relevance of the introductions while simplifying the experience for families.

This strategic phase also allowed us to model all of the business workflows, from the submission of a request through to the final exchange of contact details between the family and the facility.

2. Product Architecture and Journey Design

Given the operational complexity of the project, a significant part of the work consisted in designing the functional architecture of the platform.

We defined three distinct user journeys:

• Families looking for personalised support.
• Families wishing to express interest in a specific facility.
• Facilities wishing to join the Place des Aînés network.

All of these journeys feed a single business workflow for introductions, allowing the Place des Aînés team to qualify requests, select the relevant facilities, track responses and orchestrate the introductions.

Particular attention went to managing the different business statuses, to automatic notifications and to the traceability of each step of the process, in order to guarantee precise follow-up on every case.

3. Branding and UX/UI Design

Ahead of the interface design, we worked on the brand dimension of Place des Aînés in collaboration with Claire Pinot, Brand Designer. The goal was to give the platform a strong, differentiating identity in a market that is still very administrative.

Particular attention went into finding an emotional angle: the brand identity had above all to speak about families and human relationships, rather than settling for an institutional or purely functional stance. That choice guided every creative direction explored.

On the basis of this brand identity, the user experience was then designed to support families through a period that is often sensitive and stressful.

We designed simple, reassuring and explanatory interfaces allowing users to quickly understand the different steps of the process.

The onboarding journeys were optimised to collect the information needed to qualify cases while limiting the cognitive load on users.

The logged-in spaces were also designed to offer full visibility on how requests are progressing:

• case tracking;
• a view of the facilities contacted;
• response management;
• approval of the proposed introductions.

The goal was to turn a historically fragmented process into a fluid, transparent and understandable experience for all parties involved.

4. Platform Development and Business Automation

To meet the needs of the project, we designed a hybrid architecture built on Webflow and Odoo.

The public site was developed in Webflow to benefit from a modern, high-performing experience that is fully administrable for editorial content, facility profiles and the blog. Webflow's CMS allows the Place des Aînés team to create, edit and publish that content entirely on their own, without technical help.

In parallel, we turned Odoo into the true operational engine of the platform. Odoo's partly open-source nature allowed us to build a high-performing, highly customisable back-office at a controlled cost compared with an equivalent proprietary solution. Odoo therefore plays the role of CRM, business back-office and matching engine between family requests and facilities all at once.

The back-office centralises:

• family requests;
• facility applications;
• user logged-in spaces;
• introduction workflows;
• business automations;
• management of the facility database.

We also developed bespoke integrations to synchronise facility data between Webflow and Odoo, so as to maintain a single source of truth for the whole system.

Several dozen automations were put in place to handle:

• case creation;
• user account generation;
• email notifications;
• tracking of transmissions;
• approvals at the different steps of the workflow.

This architecture now allows Place des Aînés to manage several hundred facilities efficiently while keeping human control over the matching decisions.

Results

The new Place des Aînés platform now digitalises the entire journey of connecting families with specialised facilities.

The team now has a centralised business tool letting them steer all operations from a single environment, while families and facilities benefit from logged-in spaces offering full visibility on their procedures.

Thanks to this digital transformation, Place des Aînés can now:

• Centralise and qualify family requests within a structured workflow.
• Make it easier to find facilities suited to each resident's specific needs.
• Automate a large share of the administrative and follow-up tasks.
• Offer families a fluid, transparent experience throughout the process.
• Manage and enrich a constantly evolving facility database.
• Speed up introductions between families and partner facilities.

Since going live, the platform centralises an average of 150 new family requests per month, with the average time to an introduction brought down to 48 hours. Beyond a simple directory, Place des Aînés now has a genuine business platform designed to support families through one of the most important decisions in an elderly relative's life.