For a few of us in the team this will be a back-to-work week after the half-term break. We have a content freeze on our website until 17 July 2023 while we upgrade our CMS. So this gives us a bit of breathing space to focus on the bits of our work that sit outside our website, like our web forms, analytics and user research.

We’re also welcoming our new delivery manager, Paul, to the team this week. Paul is our first in-house delivery manager to ever join the NRW Digital team. Over the coming week’s he’ll be coming up to speed with NRW, our website, and our backlog of hopes and dreams to create better services.

Doing something on land we manage

Sam and Laura shared their latest work on ‘doing something on land we manage’ at a show and tell for staff on Tuesday.

Until now trying to find out whether you can do something on land we manage has been a complicated process for users and staff:

  • users need permission to do some activities in some locations but not in others
  • some activities are prohibited on all our land
  • others are prohibited in some places but not others
  • some activities were prohibited at certain times of the year
  • users had to decide which regional inbox to contact

Traditionally we’ve tried to explain these complexities through overarching guidance. This means users have to wade through a lot of information that isn’t relevant to them.

Sam and Laura shared recordings of users navigating the ‘permissions’ pages. Instead of getting the answer they needed from the web content, users typically scrolled through these pages before exiting on our general enquiries page to ask a question.

This is a pattern we see across NRW services: users can’t find the information they need in our web content so they send us an email or pick up the phone. All of this creates extra work for our staff and wastes the time of our users. We’ve got evidence that people have applied for permission to do something when they didn’t need to. And of course users can’t complete their task online in a single session. They have to wait for a response from us and even then they may need follow on questions.

Sam and Laura demonstrated a prototype that uses two filtering questions to check:

  • activity
  • location

The answers in the form are ordered by the most popular user queries. The prototype also uses the same language as our audience, for example ‘camping’ not ‘pitching a tent’. This service hides the complexity from the user. We do the hard work so the user doesn’t have to. Within two questions users should now know:

  • they can do something without applying for permission
  • they can do something if they apply for permission
  • they can’t do something

If they need a permit to do an activity at a location, the prototype links the user to where to apply for that permit on our website.

The audience in the show and the tell welcomed the prototype and thought it was a big improvement over our previous service. We think we can roll out this service type to others across NRW. We’ll continue to look at the data to learn and iterate.

The check if you are allowed to use land we manage service went live 23 May 2023. Give it a try!

Smart Survey training

We attended an onboarding session for the latest version of Smart Survey on Tuesday. This gave us some ideas about how we could get more out of the tool in the future. For instance, we can now embed forms directly on our web pages so we can keep our full website branding and navigation.

Making tables accessible on web pages

James met with the Wales Coast Path team to discuss how we could show a matrix of distances between locations in an accessible way. The matrix comes from a print leaflet produced by Transport for Wales.

Our first question was whether we had evidence of a user need for this sort of static table. The team said they’d seen feedback from interest groups for walkers that people did find these distance tables useful.

Presented in its current format, this table would have 28 rows and 28 columns. So it would be a challenge to use on desktop let alone mobile.

We suggested simplifying how we presented distances. So instead of being able to cross-reference any combination of 28 locations, we would give point-to-point distances in a linear way, for example.

  • Pwllheli to Abererch is 3 miles
  • Abererch to Afon Wen is 3 miles

This would involve a bit more work for the user if they had to add up the total distance between Pwllheli and Afon Wen in the example below. There were no calculations in the original matrix but this came at the expense of not working on a mobile and potentially being fiddly to use on any screen because it was designed for print.

Environmental impact assessments for forestry

Phil has been working with the forestry permitting team to improve the environmental impact assessment form. But the story does not end there. It turns out other permitting areas also use a similar process for environmental impact assessments. Although some parts of the process are similar, some are completely different.

A group of us in the Digital Team are getting together next week to understand the process better. We are hoping to come up with a more consistent approach for both the web content and forms for all environmental impact assessments across NRW.

Tips for submitting content request forms

Sophie and Kim have been doing a bit of housekeeping this week by reviewing our content board and moving tasks forward. They’ve been contacting requestees for additional information where needed, and getting rid of duplicate tasks.

Sophie and Kim have the following tips for submitting content request forms:

  • Be clear and specific about what you’re asking for. This helps us to turn around the work as quickly as possible.

  • Double check your request to make sure it’s accurate and easy to understand before sending it. This allows us to understand your request quicker and complete your request in a shorter period of time.

  • Include the URL if relevant and the DMS link to any documents you want to add to the Intranet.

  • Contact us by email if you want a progress update or want to make changes, and attach a PDF of your original request. This helps us identify the work and get answers across to you as quickly as possible.

  • Don’t submit a new request form to ask for updates. We won’t pick these up as duplicates straight away and it ends up clogging our task board and slowing down our work.

Other things we’ve been working on:

  • We’re looking forward to Gov Camp Cymru on 23 June

  • Heledd went to MsParc to work and network with people in a CDPS-hosted session. They talked about the problems caused by legacy technology. There was an interesting story about traffic lights in Leeds - this came to mind 2347: Dependency – explain xkcd

  • James spent a full day on his Service Design in Practice course on Wednesday. James and Lucinda have started their work-based challenges

  • Sam and Heledd met with colleagues from waste to talk about the impact of new separate collection of waste regs on businesses in Wales

  • Sophie has been looking for ways to improve and update content on the Intranet to help users easily find what they’re looking for. She’s met new people in different teams across the organisation and helped them to create an Intranet page that effectively meets the purpose of each page. Keep an eye out for updated Intranet pages in the coming weeks.

  • Sophie and Kim have also been actioning feedback before publishing NRW’s latest Diversity and Inclusion report 22-23 on the website.