Designing a guide platform for newcomers

Most settlement information is organised around institutions. The form, the office, the program, the ministry. For someone who has just arrived, that order is backwards. People do not wake up looking for the Régie de l'assurance maladie du Québec. They look for a family doctor, a lease, a school for their child, or a way to get their first paycheque.

That observation shaped VieauQc more than any technical decision.

The site now has more than 250 guides across 18 city hubs and a provincial section, organised into ten topics. But the navigation is not a list of organisations. It starts from situations: I just arrived, I am renting, I lost my job, my family is growing. Each dossier page offers four hand-written situations in French, English and Chinese, then points to a small set of guides. On individual guides, a “Start here” panel asks one question about the reader's situation and highlights the sections that apply.

The underlying taxonomy still exists. Situations are an overlay, not a replacement. That is a deliberate trade-off: search engines and returning readers need stable topic pages, while first-time readers need a way in that does not require knowing Quebec's administrative vocabulary.

Three rules keep the content honest:

1. Plain language first. A guide should be readable by someone at about Niveau 5 French without a dictionary. No dictionary-style openings, no manufactured urgency.
2. Cite the official source. Every fee, deadline, eligibility rule and address has to be traceable to a government page or another primary source. If it cannot be verified, it does not go in.
3. Do not invent. This matters most for news. A blank section is better than a confident sentence that turns out to be false.

Audio is part of the same idea. Reading a dense page in a second language is tiring; listening while commuting is not. Guides and news have narration in Quebec French and English. If a segment is missing from storage, the page hides the playback controls instead of falling back to a robotic browser voice. A broken promise is worse than no button.

The product is still evolving. But the principle has not changed: start with the person's next step, then work backwards to the system that produces it.