March is as intense as we’d predicted it to be in the week notes from a month ago. As a team, we were braced as we could be, but it feels busier than ever. We’re really thankful that we’ve got a supportive team.

More than ever, we’re reminding ourselves that it’s important for colleagues to request work through the formal route of submitting a content request form - as it’s not fair on individuals to get inundated with emails, when working so hard.

Learning with and from others

We love hearing from people working in design and digital teams working on similar challenges to us - it gives us a mix of inspiration and confidence that we’re on the right path.

Services Week 2023 - key takeaways and learnings

Despite everything going on, we still managed to make time to refresh our knowledge and learn new things at the presentations taking place as part of Services Week 2023.

We spoke with some of the team to hear about what they learned during the presentations and workshops.

Here’s what they had to say:

  • The highlight of Sophie’s week, as someone with dyscalculia, was learning more about designing content to support others like her. Using the latest research from the Plain Numbers Report to inform our design process could help thousands of users accessing our services around charges.
  • Heledd enjoyed hearing about the latest with the Gov.uk roadmap, their goals to make the top 75 services ‘great’ by 2023. It was also interesting to hear about the goal to bring 90% of civil service leaders to understand what’s needed for digital leadership.
  • Both Sam and Heledd were excited about the work that the Department of Education shared, in terms of documenting their design histories (something Sam’s also started doing), and their approach to assuring design standards.

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We’ve created a Mural board for our team to drop notes, learnings and links - we’ll keep adding to this as some of us are keen to catch up on recordings of some sessions once available.

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Lunch and learn and making new connections

Often when we do user research, especially around content and services for farmers and landowners on topics such as planting trees and farming, some of the feedback is related to part of the journey that’s on other people’s websites.

This week, Heledd did a presentation on Welsh Government forestry policy to talk about how we work, our website proposition, and started a conversation about how we can try and work better together. We’re looking forward to getting to know the teams in Welsh Government more so that we can help join-up the journey for people needing to access other websites, as part of a task they come to the NRW website to do.

Corporate plan - ready to go!

Our team has also been busy testing the Corporate Plan across a range of content types and applying feedback to ensure the content is engaging to users across the board. As part of our work testing the content to see how it will sit on the website, we’ve also been reviewing our existing content to delete inactive, out of date content from the website.

We’ve continued our work auditing the About Us section of the website, considering the most logical and accessible structures through that portion of the website. We have been utilising our Google Analytics data to establish which pages and page downloads are a priority to our users, and prioritising these to improve the user journey through our services.

Accessible content driving online engagement

Our work with Marine improving the accessibility of their evidence reports has been paying off, with findings being shared across social media.

For example, Skomer Marine Conservation Zone highlighted that the diversity of nudibranch species in the Skomer MCZ is exceptionally high, with 70% of all UK species represented in the area. The rich communities are filled with life as seen by the photographs within the report.

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Permit for working in or near a river (aka FRAPS)

Laura and Lucinda have been updating / improving the application for a flood risk activity permit. This week Laura met with the team to talk about the way they charge for permits. The amount someone needs to pay for the permit will vary depending on what they want to do and where. Some users can get discounts but they have to call us to confirm if they are eligible.

Amazingly the team agreed that things could be simpler, and they found it useful to look at it from the users point of view. We’re going to see if we can use SmartSurvey to help people calculate their fee. It might not be possible because of how complicated the charges are, but we want to give it a go to show the team how things could look!

A new clear way of doing things

We’ve got some big joint reports coming up about nuclear reactors. Heledd and Laura met with our radioactivity specialist advisor to talk about the best way to publish the reports to make sure they are accessible and available bilingually. We’re looking at doing things a bit differently to how we’ve done it in the past.

Moving away from just publishing everything we’re asked to and potentially duplicating content. We want to link to the reports which are hosted on partner websites instead, and encourage the team to write blogs when they have something to say instead of publishing technical project pages that rarely get updated.

Other stuff we’ve been doing…

  • Shaun and Andrew met with Emma Allcorn to create a simplified variation digital form for water resources. Their work alongside Dave Jones has continued throughout the week, working to finalise and create new water abstraction forms and web content to accommodate Strategic Review of Charging (SRoC).
  • They attended the SRoC Portfolio meeting, where we discussed pre-application advice and discretionary advice. It was good to get everyone on the same level of understanding and talk over how we could start to improve these services for users.
  • Big thanks again to our translation team being amazing and working so hard to get the new content and amended form translated.
  • Laura and James joined the Customer Experience Practitioner Network meeting to learn about the work that’s going on in that area.
  • Lucinda and James started interviewing new starters to NRW as part of our Service Design in Practice course.
  • James joined the CDPS content designers community of practice.
  • We’ve all been dropping in to Service Week webinars.
  • James has been promoting a new woodlands card sorting exercise in our ‘Timber matters’ newsletter.