A busy week this week (when is it not!). It was great to see our team in person when we met up for a two day team event in Cardiff.

We had some show and tells in BizSpace to demo new work and get feedback from our team:

  • Lucinda talked about how we finally have an online job application form in Beta
  • Sophie demonstrated the changes she’s made to our content request form
  • Laura talked her recent deep dive into user needs and analytics on the education section of our website

We also had a chance to discuss what’s going well/not going well since we last met in Shrewsbury in September.

And we finished the day with an amazing Christmas meal in the Giggling Squid:

We ended the night at Tiny Rebel:

Meeting with Welsh Government’s digital team

As part of our team catch-up, we had a tour of the new NRW offices in the Welsh Government building in Cathays Park.

We also met up with Roland Allan and some of the Welsh Government digital team to hear about the content challenges they face and look at ways of better working together.

Many of the topics we work on in NRW either originate from the Welsh Government or cross back to them at some point.

It was interesting to hear how the Welsh Government Digital Team face similar challenges to us of receiving ‘signed off’ content that isn’t particularly user-friendly but has to be published to a tight deadline. It was also great to get some insight into how the Welsh Government digital team work with their subject matter experts.

Organising regular team updates about user feedback

James and Alex met to discuss how we can better collate, analyse and share all the user feedback that comes in through:

  • Hotjar
  • our CMS feedback function
  • Customer Hub email and call logs
  • content request forms that reference user feedback

We know a lot of our feedback is about issues we can’t fix at the moment:

  • stand-alone legacy platforms with obscure labelling
  • maps that don’t display properly on mobile because they’re too complicated
  • permits that depend on location but no easy way for the user to check the restrictions for their location

Instead, we’ll focus on problems that are in our gift to fix. At the same time we can create a backlog of priorities for the future. Having this evidence to hand will help make the case for future developments. We’ll also be able to frame the issues in the users’ own voice and have a sense of how regularly these issues crop up in feedback.

Helping Deloitte define what NRW does

James met with Deloitte service designer Ella Murdoch this week to review the list of NRW services that she’s working on.

As part of our transformation project, Deloitte is working to define what NRW does from a user perspective.

Prior to this we’ve had a lot of tech investigations into individual platforms and user research into various services. These all threw up challenges and pain points for users. But we haven’t had a holistic view to share with our executive team.

James shared his thoughts on how Deloitte has grouped our services and talked about the feedback he’s heard from users in the past four years in NRW.

Sam and Heledd have also shared lots of data, reports and knowledge we’ve gathered as a team over the years, and commented on the huge Figma board. We’re all impressed at how Ella and team have taken everything on board and tried to synthesise all the various strands, activities and outcomes into something simple.

Adding ‘service down’ messages for River Levels

James met the River Levels team to discuss how we could add messages to web pages if our River Levels service went down. This presented some familiar challenges to our team:

  • the River Levels service sits on its own domain
  • it’s hard-coded
  • the Digital Team doesn’t have access to the platform to make changes

We can add ‘service down’ messages to the River Levels landing page on our website. But there’s a problem with how this would appear in the user journey.

This landing page only gets 3% of the traffic of the River Levels service. The other 97% navigate to a River Levels page without seeing the landing page and any warning messages on that page.

If a user searches for ‘check river levels’ on Google, our River Levels landing page is the second result (after the gov.uk site). This would be a great route in and a great way to display ‘service down’ messages if users searched for information in that way.

However our on-site search data shows that during bad weather users search for specific river names and locations:

We haven’t got data about search engine queries prior to landing on our site but it’s a reasonable assumption that users search in the same way.

Our SEO works well when users want to check river levels for a location. For example a Google search for “river level ely at ely bridge” returns the correct river levels station page of our service as the top result:

But what’s completely absent is the River Levels landing page on our website, i.e. the only place we can display a ‘site down’ message. This link didn’t appear in the top 30 results of the test query above.

It would be very difficult to force organic searches through the landing page because our 400+ river level stations are better optimised for the way users search.

We’ll do our best to help the River Levels team but it’s an illustration of the problems caused by waterfall projects that don’t have any resources for continuous development.

Other things we’ve been working on:

  • James rewrote some new content about the impact of flood risk on insurance and mortgages
  • James, Paul and Phil are still working to improve the felling licence application form and web content. This is proving to be a very long and complex task. The application form improvements will combine user research insights, best practice around plain language, and new sections to reflect changes in legislation
  • Phil provided Sam with great suggestions following his 2i check of new cockles form and content – they really helped to pin down the meaning of a tricky bit
  • Sam did some more work on the ‘calculate your waste stacking distances’ calculator prototype ready for a ‘show the thing’ chat with SMEs next week
  • Heledd went to her first NRW People Board. It was a great opportunity to hear about the organisation’s future ambitions and changes to how we recruit - it included some impressive proposals for collaboration and apprenticeships.

Friday fun fact!

As it is December 1st, kids (and adults) will be opening their advert calendars today. But did you know that Germany has the world’s largest and smallest advent calendar.

Largest advent calendar

The town of Gengenbach in Baden-Württemberg, Germany, boasts what it calls the Das weltgrößte Adventskalenderhaus (the World’s Largest Advent Calendar House). Every December for more than 15 years, the city’s town hall is transformed into a two-story Advent calendar, with the structure’s 24 windows (two rows of 11, plus two more in the roof) each decorated with a Christmas tableau, revealed one per day throughout the season.

Hubert Grimmig, Kultur- und Tourismus GmbH Gengenbach / Hubert Grimmig, Kultur- und Tourismus GmbH Gengenbach

Smallest advert calendar

In 2007, a trio of German students, members of the University of Regensburg’s micro- and nanostructures group, created what surely remains the world’s smallest Advent calendar, a nanoscale etching that includes depictions of holiday imagery, including Santa Claus, a bell, a snowman and a snow-covered church. How small is it? It would take five million of the calendars to fill the surface area of a postage stamp.

Source: © D Neumaier, J Biberger and F Goetz