Timber!

Last year we spent a lot of time trying to improve the woodland creation area of our website. Things haven’t been easy, but we got there in the end.

So now it’s time for the managing your woodland section to have a make-over. Our mission is to create task focused content. It’s been years since this area has had a make-over. We have outdated pages, and the content is not very accessible or inclusive.

We are lucky in the digital team to be working with such lovely contractors to help us manage this piece of work. The team improving our forestry web content are Heledd, James, Rob, Isobel, Christine, Louise and me, Phil.

Managing your woodland area is all about tree disease, tree management and making your woodland more resilient to the effects of climate change. We also have a section on protecting our precious wildlife during any work in the forest.

Having up to date, task focused content that supports user needs will help our people look after their trees and forests for years to come.

User research: trees, licences and NRW

James, our user researcher, fired up the new week by presenting user research findings into tree felling.

Eleven users, interviewed for one hour each, gave a picture of what it’s like to apply for a licence to cut down trees.

We love James’ sessions and in this one we learned a lot.

What was striking was that most of these users have a transactional relationship with NRW:

  • they go straight to the tree felling licence application form and try to work it out what to do from there
  • they tend not to use overarching guidance, wanting practical tools and information specific to their task
  • lots of content was getting in the way of them completing the task

James has also reported findings back to the felling team.

Whenever we research with users, the same things are said about our website. There’s too much detail, unclear language, vague content or guidance and confusing navigation.

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Opening up

We’re getting into the groove of working in the open.

Using Mural, we capture our ideas for stories to tell in week notes, blogs and show and tells. We store memorabilia - images, quotes, slides that we want to use.

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With a flexible plan for who works on weeknotes each week, we write in pairs to help each other out.

After a bit of a gap we’re revitalising our team show & tells next month. If you’d like a calendar invite, fill in this short form for an invite to our show & tells.

And we’re preparing a show & tell for SMEs on the ‘permission to do something on NRW land’ work we did in the Learn by Making Lab. We’re hoping we can push ahead with this work to solve problems for users.

Some other stuff we’re doing

Sam, Laura and Lucinda are working on content types.

Kim’s making final tweaks to guidance on how to create accessible documents. Owain has checked it with screen reader software.

NRW is revising its corporate plan and Shaun, James and Phil gave feedback.

Sophie has started auditing the About us section of the website - it’s hefty. Our aim is to streamline this section before the new corporate plan goes live in April.

Colleagues are using the new content request form. We hope they’re unaware of the fishy flow that sits behind it. The new format is helping us manage and prioritise incoming work better.

Lucinda has been working hard tweaking our content planner board and tagging all new work that comes into the digital team. The tags such as: accessibility check, task focused content and project updates match the fields in our content request form. These new tags will help us prioritise our work.