For some of us this will be the second week of school summer holidays (only four more weeks to go!). It’s a change of pace: less rushing and back and forth on school runs…but potentially more distraction if you’re working from home.

Trio writing book launch

The Centre for Digital Public Services (CDPS) is launching a new book about trio-writing in the National Eisteddfod next week. Our very own Heledd has contributed a chapter. Congratulations on being a published author Heledd!

Trio writing is a new approach to designing better bilingual services. It pairs subject matter experts, content designers and translators to design content in English and Welsh from the outset.

Traditionally many organisations have worked hard to get everything right in English then passed the content for translation. The translators often had no context or background about the design decisions, and limited opportunity to suggest any changes because they were only involved in the final step.

In NRW we’ve been at the forefront of trio writing. We experimented with the technique when we worked on our new woodland content and found that there were multiple benefits. Trio-writing not only avoids committing to phrases that are catchy in English but clunky in Welsh, it also improves the English. We found that when our translator questioned what things meant, it made us rethink the English to make it clearer.

Register for the event if you’re interested in attending the book launch.

CDPS are also running a lunch and learn about pair writing and trio writing on 7 August 2023.

Fishing permit interviews

This week James ran a user interview about Welsh Government fishing permits, as part of his Service Design in Practice course. Although these types of permits are within Welsh Government’s remit, it was useful hearing about similar design issues to NRW.

James spoke to an admin officer in the fishing permits team about common pain points for fishermen when applying for and renewing their permits. As we’ve found with waste exemptions in NRW, the system is complicated and has multiple forms to cover near identical user goals. This was due to old bye-laws rather than user needs. For instance, you need a permit to fish for lobster in north Wales but not in the south. There is also no integrated system for enforcement officers to check permits against permit holders. At the moment, officers in the field need to cross-reference multiple Excel spreadsheets on their phones.

We’re arranging more interviews to speak with fishermen in August.

Branding our API Manager Portal

Lucinda and James are working on branding our API Manager Portal with NRW’s logo, font and style. This is a portal where users can access API keys to integrate our services into their own websites and applications, for instance river levels or flood warnings.

We can use this branding exercise as a basis for future work on many stand-alone portals we have.

Lunch and maps

Post it notes on whiteboard after a brainstorm

Lucinda and Laura travelled to Cardiff for lunch out with the team… and to work on the permissions project of course.

They were mostly talking about maps and how we can make it easier for users to show on a map where they want to do a thing. After meeting with the Geographical Information Systems (GIS) team to find out what is and isn’t possible, they came up with a list of criteria that includes:

  • a clean interface
  • minimal layers
  • simple buttons (plot route, undo, remove)
  • labels or pins to mark points

They’re also going to ask about having a map that shows all of the land we manage.

Hopefully GIS can come up with something we can test with users.

Unpublishing old blogs, news items and statements

This week we’ve unpublished all blogs and news items that are over two years old. We haven’t identified a user need to justify keeping these old stories and they clog up our on-site search results. There is also a risk that users follow these links and see out of date information.

Laura roped in Heledd to help move/unpublish the last ‘statements’. A job that is ‘small’ but can be hard to know what to do with the content. Statements are now (finally) gone. This means the comms team have less confusing options when figuring out where to publish. Now they just choose from press releases or blogs.

Other things we’ve been working on:

  • Shaun is working on content for local planning authorities about planning applications in protected areas with rivers. He’s found that it’s a challenge bringing people together from different areas in NRW who are working on content for the same user.

  • Sam is building mining waste content into waste permit application forms.

  • James is investigating a free trial of new features in our Hotjar subscription.

  • Lucinda attended an in-person meeting for her Service Design in Practice course. They used the time to review their user research about how construction companies understand which permits they need.

  • Lucinda, Laura and Sam met in person to work on permission to do things on NRW land.

  • Sam has been working with public affairs on ways to collect Welsh Government correspondence.

  • Sophie is reviewing an auto-response to ask subject matter experts to send all content requests to our team inbox. She’s also updated her masterlist of evidence reports to make sure we’re making progress on publishing them.

  • Paul is continuing to work on a proposal for a new team workflow, following feedback from the team last week.

  • Sam, Laura and Lucinda have sent the new Newborough horse riding permit application to be fact checked by the subject matter expert.