For some of us this week marked the end of the school summer holidays and the start of a new school year for our children. In an echo of the weeknotes we wrote at the start of the holidays, this is the return of packed lunches, homework and school runs. But at the same time, we’re probably enjoying a bit less disruption when working from home.

Revising our felling licence content

Phil and James have been working with our subject matter experts to revise our felling licence content. This is two-fold:

  • Actioning recommendations from our own user research
  • Adding content to reflect changes caused by the Wales Agriculture Bill, which is due to come into force in 2024

The Wales Agriculture Bill gives NRW new powers around felling licences to:

  • Set baseline environmental conditions for all licences
  • Set individual conditions for licences, based on location
  • Amend, suspend or revoke licences, for instance if we become aware of protected species in the area
  • Issue unlimited fines for illegal felling

The new content above shows some of the problems we face as content designers. We worked hard for 18 months to redesign our entire woodland and forestry pages based on many rounds of user research. As a final step we did three rounds of card sorting exercises to draft the information architecture and then validated that structure in user interviews.

The new content essentially picks apart the user journeys for the felling licence pages. It introduces new complications that have never been tested with users (either as ideas or as web content). We know that users who are not forestry professionals already struggle to provide technical information like estimating the volume of trees they wanted to fell or creating maps that met our specifications. The legislation forces us to further complicate our web content.

The new content is also throwing up challenges about ways of working, approaching topics in silos, and user-centred design. The subject matter experts have an expectation that they write the content, Welsh Government approves it, and we publish. We thought we’d resolved all these issues with our Digital Standards.

Flood Warning Information Service face-to-face meet-up

Alex attended a Flood Warning Information Service meet-up in Cardiff on Tuesday 5 September to get a sense of how the project was developing. This is a replacement flood warning service for when our contract with the Environment Agency expires next year. We’ve been working with a technology partner, BJSS, to develop our own service for Wales.

Tuesday was a chance for the project group to come together and demonstrate what they’d built so far. We have some remaining concerns in the Digital Team about how the new service will deliver fully bilingual flood messages to our users. We’re supporting the project in trying to find solutions to this issue. James has been asking Canadian provinces how they deal with issuing English and French messages during emergency situations.

Service design project presentations

Lucinda and James have been busy planning their end of course presentations for ‘Service Design in Practice’. These are both work-based challenges and will mark the end of their six months course.

Lucinda has been working with NRW subject matter experts to prototype a service to help the construction industry understand which permits they need from us. This is based on feedback from the Permitting teams that users struggle to understand this area.

James has been working with Welsh Government colleagues to understand the user needs of fishermen when applying for fishing permits.

Beyond the user research for the course project, James has arranged to meet a Welsh Government content designer to discuss how we can better align information about gathering cockles on the NRW and Welsh Government sites. At the moment NRW issues permits for two cockling areas in Wales and the Welsh Government manages the other areas. The users are likely to be the same people so it would be helpful if we could present our application forms and information in a similar way.

Figuring out how to go live with Gov.uk Pay

Sam and Alex met with a colleague who has experience using Gov.uk Pay to find out what we need to do before going live. They came away with some answers, and more questions for both our Finance team and Gov.uk.

The prospect of going live with our first ever application form with online payments is tantalisingly close now, but there’s still quite a few niggly details that need ironing out, like:

  • how do finance reconcile payments for Newborough horse riding permits at the moment?
  • can we use the organisation’s Worldpay account?
  • do we use a shared Gov.uk Pay account or have individual ones?

With lots of questions and what if’s swirling around, Sam and Laura took some time to re-focus on the priority:

‘Going live with GOV.UK small scale relatively risk-free to learn and gain confidence and awareness. Focus is on making it easier for users to apply and pay and eliminate the need for us to chase payment’.

They came up with a refreshed ‘to do’ list and compiled a list of questions for Gov.uk Pay. They also decided to write a doom plan of all the things that could go wrong. Such positive people, preparing for the worst!

Fungi fact Friday

The seasons have officially changed, and so too has the Natural Resources Wales’ website banner. Moving away from the beautiful beachy imagery of summer, we showcased a new photograph, supplied by NRW’s own fungi expert, Sam Bosanquet. The photo features the Splendid Waxcap mushroom: a rare indicator of high quality ancient grassland, known from about 80 sites scattered across Wales.

Sam told us: “Like most other grassland fungi it fruits in the autumn, with characteristically large, bright red caps held on smooth, yellow and red stems. NRW use Waxcaps and other grassland fungi to assess the suitability of areas for woodland creation, as well as designating the most diverse sites (typically with 50 or more species of specialist grassland fungi) as SSSIs.”

Thanks again Sam for the image and this interesting information! Check out the new banner on our website.

Also happening this week

  • Sophie’s been updating all sorts across the website, fixing accessibility issues, updating files and web content as well as correcting FSC trademark use.
  • It’s also been a busy week for the team, who have been getting stuck in reviewing evidence reports and making them accessible to publish on our site. You can have a read of them in our Research and reports section.
  • Laura is preparing to go live with a the new ‘flood risk activity permit form’ early next week - final checks being completed.
  • Laura and Alex are meeting with the Education team to discuss ‘all things digital’ - could be lots to come there.
  • Andrew is building a list of our live Smart Survey forms. This is part of our work to standardise our web forms. It will help a lot knowing how many live forms we have.
  • James and Heledd met with the SoNaRR team to discuss better ways of presenting the next SoNaRR report.
  • James is continuing to build a tutorial about GA4 based on the user needs of our team. Many of the online tutorials are focused on selling products or generating leads and spend a lot of time talking about tools which aren’t relevant to NRW.
  • Phil is working with Alex to standardise the declaration text in all our forms. The declaration text in the forms is currently not consistent, this could cause problems for the organisation down the line. Our aim is to simplify the wording in the declaration and to work with our legal team to approve the new text.