Making and learning

The Learn by Making Lab experiment ended this week.

It was 8 days jam-packed with guest expert speakers, exploring problems, sketching, usability testing, prototyping and a show and tell or two. We’re still absorbing what we’ve learned and achieved in such a short time.

A Giles Turnbull masterclass

Giles gave a fab masterclass in agile comms and how to clearly and creatively work in the open.

When we’ve tried to work weeknotes and blogs in the open in the past we have agonised over what to say and how to say it. But Giles encouraged us to:

  • be brave
  • less planning and more publishing when we have something to say or show
  • relax and don’t worry about sounding corporate - just be ourselves
  • show the thing - collect pictures / screenshots / quotes to show people

This is something we really want to practise and make part of our work every day.

We even got a copy of his fantastic book….so no excuses.

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You can read more about Giles - go on!

We tested the prototype

The other highlight of this week was usability testing - seeing users trying to use our existing service and the prototype.

We made notes while our 3 testers talked through their experiences of the ‘permissions’ service.

Users said the prototype was simple and clear. They said they liked being told whether they needed to apply for permission. They had different approaches to telling us what land they wanted to do something on from grid references to What 3 Words and they liked the idea of an interactive map.

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Not content with content

Testing identified some strong themes about the current service:

  • content is too detailed
  • content focuses on NRW than the user’s task
  • the current process is frustrating, stressful, cumbersome and time consuming
  • the process should be proportionate to the task - filming Mission Impossible on NRW land is not the same as going for a guided walk, yet they are treated in the same way
  • people avoid asking permission from NRW as the process is too complicated

By testing our prototype, we now have some evidence that interactive content can work well for users. It gives them answers quickly. We could iterate that prototype based on what we’ve learned; keep testing and refining - it’s an approach with lots of potential for NRW’s users.

When we’ve run usability testing over the last 5 years, users have struggled to complete tasks because the content is too detailed and written from an NRW perspective.

Time to show and tell

After 8 days of blood, sweat and post-it notes, it was time to show people what we had been working on. With only a couple of hours to pull everything together into a presentation for the NRW Digital Governance Board, it was a pressure cooker situation.

Here’s Sam and Lucinda working on the presentation…

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We were properly proud and nervous to show our work. Buoyed by seeing our whole team dialled in to the call, we presented everything we had done, including some hard hitting clips from the usability testing and talking through the prototype.

We think it went well. There were some really positive comments and some questions that we will reflect on.

Just an experiment

So, we’ve had space to experiment and work collaboratively to explore a problem in an agile way - in line with the Digital Service Standards for Wales. Together with everything we’ve learned from our awesome speakers, we have tons of energy and renewed enthusiasm. And although the lab and our work with CDPS colleagues on this has ended, we could continue exploring this problem - NRW has the skills to do it.