Dydd Gŵyl Dewi Hapus (Happy St David’s Day for the 1 March)

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Waste permit applications

It’s been a pleasure to work closely with Steve - our waste SME - this week on updating and improving the waste permitting service for users. Steve’s on board with our mission to create content and services that users can find, understand and use. His background of working out in the field brings a lot of this alive - it’s great.

Currently, if someone running a scrap yard wants to change their permit they have to download and fill in four forms, then download and read four documents on how to fill in the forms.

As well as the problem of volume of paperwork, all of the forms are multipurpose to be used for:

  • different reasons (for example, both a new permit and changing a permit)
  • a wide range of business activity (for example, from recycling centres to intensive chicken farms)
  • different types of applicant (from sole traders to large companies)

This means that there are a lot of ‘if you’ve answered ‘yes’, you can move to section 3d’ or ‘this only applies if you are applying for a waste permit’ type instructions.

They are difficult to use unless you’re practised at it and impossible for some, including people who want to apply in Welsh.

We aren’t digitising the paper forms because of the problems that can create. So we’re repackaging, reframing, rephrasing and giving users only what they need to get their task done - and NRW what they need to consider the application.

Without our own form builder, we use SmartSurvey. We have an accessible, branded template and can use skip logic to route users through the journey they need. As far as we can, we have followed the GDS service manual on structuring forms, adding one thing per page and considering how we ask questions.

And throughout, we’re working to Lou Downe’s 15 principles for Good Services where we can.

We’re aiming for an April launch and there’s every sign we can keep working with SMEs to iterate the content and flow based on how well it works for users and staff.

Show and tell: managing woodlands and About us

Heledd introduced our team’s second show and tell this year. She was joined by Isobel Croot from our delivery partner DXW who summarised recent work done on the woodland management content.

Card sorting

James gave an overview of his latest research on testing the managing woodland content structure. He’d carried out two rounds of online card sorting, where users (NRW staff and various woodland planners, forestry agents and landowners) drag and drop cards with the names of web pages into categories that make sense to them.

Some of the findings included:

  • People wanting the card titles to be more task-focused and descriptive
  • Some things belong in more than one category
  • Some things are difficult to categorise
  • Different user group were grouping them in the same same kind of areas

We’re looking forward to seeing this work develop.

About us

Christine Cawthorne, also from DXW, gave an update on the work that is being done to the ‘About us’ section of the site. This ended with an audience-led card sorting exercise to help us think about what might be the most user-friendly route through the section.

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Non-remit, but not for our users

We’ve been thinking about the questions users come to us with but that the organisation considers as ‘non-remit’. There’s often a tendency to avoid saying what we don’t deal with - or what our role isn’t - and rarely do we point users in the right direction by signposting to other websites.

It is complicated: how does someone know when to contact a local authority or a regulatory body, Welsh government or an arms-length body?

We try to tackle this for our report an incident service as it’s important that users’ time isn’t wasted and organisations are able to deal with issues quickly.

Another is where we created a page to tackle a common query around who is responsible for rivers, streams and culverts in Wales. It’s not easy to tell from our data whether this has reduced the volume of contacts, but analytics tells us that it’s a popular page.

We’re going to examine the queries we receive through our contact us form and decide what we can do now to best meet users’ needs on the non-remit stuff, even if it means just swiftly moving the user on to another organisation.

Other stuff we’ve been doing

  • Heledd met with the Customer Experience team and Mima, who shared an update on work to collate a complete list of NRW services. There’s still lots to do in terms of refining the lists but it’s starting to take shape in terms of seeing everything the organisation currently does in one list.
  • Shaun, Phil and Andrew are working with SMEs from across the business on modernising the way we deliver to users parts of the licensing and permitting service
  • Sophie is looking at the communications section of the intranet to see how we can streamline and update content
  • James and Lucinda enjoyed day one of their service design in practice course in Cardiff
  • Sophie has published several marine evidence reports this week, helping the marine team understand better how to create accessible documents
  • Our survey is still open for users to tell us what they think about the how to comply with your environmental permit guidance - we’re gathering lots of valuable data
  • Andrew, Kim & Sophie get to stay with the team for a bit longer - a big hooray!