In the blink of an eye, it’s February. Where did January go? I’m keeping my fingers crossed for warmer days ahead. It’s been good news though for our flooding teams who have finally had a break from all this wet weather.

Well… what’s been happening this week in the digital team.

Sonarr

James has been analysing user interviews to help shape the 2025 Sonarr (State of Natural Resources Report).

He’s spoken to 6 users from:

  • Welsh Government
  • Dŵr Cymru
  • Brecon Beacons National Park
  • RSPB Cymru
  • NRW teams who work with Public Service Boards

User feedback about Sonarr is similar to what we hear about other NRW services:

  • Sonarr is written to answer legislative duties on NRW not user tasks
  • Users find it time-consuming and laborious to extract the information they need, often having to open every chapter and manually search for words
  • Few users need evidence at an all-Wales level
  • It’s difficult to find evidence at a local authority or regional level
  • NRW holds a lot of relevant regional data but we don’t signpost people to it in Sonarr
  • The key messages are lost in a narrative structure instead of bullet points
  • People want NRW to be more confident in saying: “To restore biodiversity this is what needs to happen xxx”

‘How to comply with your environmental permit’ survey

James has created a survey to gather feedback about how people use the ‘How to comply with your environmental permit’ guidance.

This has gone out to around 800 industry contacts and should help show how people use the guidance, what are their pain points and whether it meets their user needs.

We can then hold user interviews to drill down into these themes.

It’s good when a plan comes together

We have been very busy working to improve the content of the woodlands and forest section of our website. With our new website proposition and tools in our growing Content publishing manual, it feels like we’re well equipped now for the task ahead!

The task this week was to get a plan in place. We had to find out what was happening with each piece of content.

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 We have outdated pages, and the content is not very accessible or inclusive.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 started this piece of work by having a very productive meeting with our subject matter experts. The experts came from forestry, species and the felling licence teams. The meeting’s aim was to get their feedback on the new structure of the woodland management and licences pages.

We got some good feedback, thank you to everyone who took part. Now we have this valuable information, the next step is to create an information architecture.

The science behind structuring content

Information architecture is about helping people understand their surroundings and find what they’re looking for, in the real world as well as online.

Signage at airports, and tube navigation maps are great examples of information architecture in the real world. They both help people to understand where they are, what’s around them, and what to expect.

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The history of information architecture goes as far into the past as ancient Egypt. Librarians in the library of Alexandria listed the content of the library on a 120-scroll bibliography. The principle is the same, but the Egyptians didn’t call it an information architecture, it was common sense.

After that, things were quiet on the information architecture front, until the internet came along and changed everything.

We need to change the information architecture of our entire website. We need to make it easier for our users to find what they are looking for.

For the moment though we’re starting small and just improving the forestry and woodlands section.

Once we have our brand-new forestry and woodlands information architecture in place we can start work to improve the content.

James will then take the new information architecture and test the structure with our staff and external users.

Watch this space for further updates on this project.

A fully accessible website

On 23 September 2018 new accessibility regulations came into force that required all public sector bodies to have an accessible website.

Sophie and Kim have been working through the bird licence PDF files. They have been turning the PDFs into accessible HTML pages. Having these pages as fully accessible and inclusive HTML pages makes it easier for everyone to understand and use the content and does not discriminate against anyone.

Our website is now pretty much fully accessible, but we still have things to do. It’s not 100% accessible. We still have some Microsoft Word forms, Excel files and PDFs that are not accessible or inclusive.

We are going to take another look at our accessibility statement and try to improve even more things on our website. We don’t want to discriminate against anyone, so our work continues to have a fully accessible website.

Fabulous forms

Andrew and Shaun have started updating a selection of online water discharge forms. These forms require a lot of updating. The forms range from changing a permit to sheep dip discharge forms. We are creating new forms and would like to thank Dave Jones for all his support and guidance with these.

Also, on the list of online forms to amend are nine species forms and a new online seal licence form.

Permissions project

After lots of preparation it was finally time for Sam, Lucinda, Laura and Heledd to present their show and tell about the permissions project. Looking at how people apply to do something on NRW land. Like hold a running event or organise a forest school. It follows on from the work they did in the CDPS Learn by Making lab experiment. They presented to The Head of Land Stewardship and Team Leader for Estate Recreation Planning who were very supportive of the work and gave the green light to keep going.

Sam got their Trello board up and running straight away and they’re getting stuck in, mapping user journeys for the six application forms that are currently available for this service.

Two hours of free advice

Lucinda, Sam, Kim, and Phil are continuing to map out what is currently on the website about the pre-application/two hours of free advice process.

It’s becoming clear that the information on our website about the pre-application process is not consistent and is certainly not user friendly.

We are going to continue to gather information about the different services we offer, what they’re all called, and what the process is for our users. Sam is giving us a demonstration of the internal user research findings this week.

Some other stuff we’re doing

Sophie has been carrying out many accessible checks on the backlog of marine reports.

Sam published how we write for the web guidelines in our content and publishing manual.