Welcome back! We hope your Easter was all it was cracked up to be.

Before we hop into the nitty gritty of our week, here’s a little Easter trivia for you.

photo of a bunny wearing sunglasses

Easter trivia

Do you know how many Easter eggs are sold in the UK every year?

If you guessed 80 million, you’d be correct.

And in which country was the tradition of the Easter bunny born?

The answer is Germany.

Wales has a few unique Easter traditions though, with different regions celebrating in their own way.

Across Wales on Easter Monday (known in Welsh as Dydd Llun y Pasg), people take part in a procession up the mountains, a pre-dawn trek up to the very top of the nearest mountain or hill to watch the sunrise and celebrate.

In Llangollen in Denbighshire, a county in north east Wales, people have been known to do three somersaults on the apex of Dinas Bran – a hilltop famous in mediaeval Welsh folk tales. This fell out of custom a while ago but is slowly making a comeback amongst young people.

Another popular tradition of the past, particularly in Anglesey in north west Wales, is the practice of egg-clapping, or ‘clapio wyau’ in Welsh. During the 19th Century, people would collect hen eggs from farmers to fill the family pantry for the Easter celebrations. However, kids these days prefer to collect chocolate eggs. Children visit local farms around Carreglefn, Brynsiencyn, Llynfaes, Talwrn and Llannerchymedd to ‘clap for eggs’ using a wooden instrument as they sing a customary Welsh rhyme. Lucinda and Heledd are disappointed that despite having resided in the North West region for most of their lives, they have never taken part in clapio wyau - but there’s always next year! Read more about Welsh Easter traditions.

The unveiling of a new part of the NRW website

Since returning to the office this week, you may have noticed that some things on the website have changed. We have been working hard these past few months to audit the ‘About us’ section of the site and rebuild it to ensure users can find relevant content.

While there were initially some aches and pains with broken links, we’ve been very lucky to have the support of the wider NRW team who have been letting us know about any error messages and broken links they find. This has been invaluable in the process of rebuilding this portion of the website, and your feedback has been greatly appreciated.

screenshot of the new about us structure

Some things have moved around slightly…

But if you are struggling to find or access a page, please get in touch with us. Nothing has been deleted, only unpublished, and we can recover anything you think may have been removed by mistake.

Digital refresh after the holidays – our tips and tricks

We hope that you had an egg-stra special time with your family over the Easter holiday, and you are returning to your desk with a chocolate-hangover and a refreshed outlook on life. But if not, here are some of our team’s top tips for a digital refresh to help you get back into the swing of things.

Sophie’s advice:

  • Clear away the clutter – tidy up your desktop and your inbox, organising any relevant information can help you get back into the swing of things. You may even want to block out a bit of time in your diary to allocate time for this, so that you are able to focus without interruptions.
  • Catch up with your colleagues – we have a great team, despite being largely made up of remote workers, who can lean on one another for support. Make sure to reach out to those on your team to check in with one another.
  • Update your software - While we were off, there were some software updates released for key apps used in our organisation, such as Ivanti as well as Windows. Make sure to check your system for available updates, and if you are having any issues, don’t worry, be hoppy, and restart your device before panicking.

James’ top tip:

  • Setting goals - To improve your productivity, you could try setting yourself an impossibly tight deadline. Force yourself to create that presentation in an hour, chances are it will be more focused and better than the one you spent 5 hours labouring over.

Using the land we look after - a show and tell

Lucinda and Laura presented a show and tell to the all-Wales Permissions team (Sam couldn’t make it this time but we were determined to do her proud!) It was the first meeting with the whole team to show our user-centred approach and show how we need to do things differently.

We talked through:

  • how people use websites
  • problems with this area of the website
  • user research
  • internal research
  • how we mapped the current forms
  • the prototype
  • next steps

It seemed to go well. The team said that while the user research felt a bit brutal (and it was!), it was good to hear it.

The team agreed that we need to completely scrap the 7 forms we use currently and have one route in for everyone. Woohoo! They also said they really liked what they saw of the prototype.

We ended the show and tell, with a few questions to trigger some discussion. We uncovered quite a lot in a short space of time. Including inconsistencies between the different areas and how they deal with applications differently.

Finally, our biggest win of the day. The team agreed to set up a central mailbox for applications. At the moment the user has to choose where they send their application: North West, North East, South East, South Central, South West, or Mid Wales. This suggestion hasn’t gone too well in the past because of concerns over adding to staff workload.

We prepared for this push back by demonstrating that the team only receives two applications a day on average.That helped. But the real game changer came when one of the team confirmed that (surprise surprise) users pick the wrong inbox and forms go to the wrong area. Some of the team are checking their email on their days off to pass on any applications that have come to them by accident. We’re not only pleased that we can improve things for users, but also we can help improve the well-being of staff.

screenshot of the digital team show and tell

All in all it was a really good show and tell. Lots still to do!

A productive train journey and meeting

Heledd went on a train to a cold and wet Cardiff. Spending 8 hours on the train in one day was a great way to deal with a bulging backlog of admin tasks.

The journey had another purpose, as she spent the day with the lovely Christine Cawthorn from Crocstar. They reviewed and considered career progression frameworks that other digital teams have - and started to plot what roles we need to build into our permanent team in future. Christine will now write up all the post-its into a lovely document, for Heledd to start speaking with others in NRW about what we can (realistically) do next.

heledd meeting with christine and rob for tea and cake

After their meeting, Rob from FourthWallContent, who’s been working with us on woodland content joined them for tea and cake - look how happy they were to see one another?

Other things we’ve been working on…

  • This week, Kim, Lucinda and Sophie have been testing the new About us section, finding and fixing broken links, and highlighting out-of-date content.

  • Andrew met with the new Cockle Fishery Management Officer, Martin Ward to discuss improvements to NRW’s daily digital catch returns form. They discussed changing the forms from a daily return to a weekly one. By doing this, it should make it easier for end users to complete their returns in one weekly visit rather than entering them on a daily basis. The cockle fishing season opens in July so any improvements made will need to be in time for this.

  • James has been holding user research interviews to get feedback about our draft ‘Woodlands and forests’ landing page.

  • James and Phil met with Welsh Government and NRW staff to talk about the user needs for the urban tree page. We learned a lot and now we have an additional task: to review our Tree Preservation Order content. It’s currently misleading and doesn’t make sense for our users.

  • Phil has also been working on the ‘Check if you need a wildlife licence during forest operations’ content.

  • Heledd also met the lovely Dianne, who this week started working in our department as Digital and Customer Transformation Programme manager. It was great to hear that she’d found and read our Digital Strategy before her interview. She’d noted lots of similarities with the strategy she worked on at the Scottish Government. We look forward to working with her over the coming months.

every bunny was kung fu fighting meme

If you’ve read this far, thank you - you’re a good egg. Thanks for taking an interest in the egg-citing work we’re doing in the Digital Team.