Weeknotes 23/02/2024

It’s been another hectic week for the Digital team with lots of meetings and even more requests coming in. So lets jump right in and let you know what we’ve been doing this week.

Service design training

This week some of the digital team went along to a one day ‘school of good services’ training course. Thank you to Centre for Digital Public Services and the Welsh Government for funding these courses.

Many of us in the team are big fans of The School of Good Services, and have come across the principles in books, blogs and previous training courses over the years.

On Monday, Heledd joined the Leadership training session with people from different public sector bodies in Wales. It was a great opportunity to learn some new frameworks to help create the right conditions and build capability for service design.

On Thursday, Heledd, Toyah, Alex and Phil (we came in force), learnt all about the principles of service design, and a lot more!

The course looked at the services we deliver and how they should help our users do what they set out to do, with as little friction as possible. In reality, this is easier said than done.

We learnt all about:

• how to make sure our services are findable, usable and meets user’s needs
• how to make sure our services are accessible and inclusive
• how to identify problems with our services and make improvements
• prototyping our services
• how to design a service and then put it through the alpha and beta phase, before making it live

Toyah had this to say:

• It was an intense whirlwind of a day
• It was really interesting to hear expanded explanations of the principles covered in the Good Services book
• Trying to apply the processes and techniques to the fledgling marine licensing project was often tricky! But being in a group with people from other areas of Natural Resources Wales meant we shared a wider range of perspectives and ideas, which was quite handy.

What made the course even better was the mix of people from different areas of Natural Resources Wales learning together. We had people from digital, data, technology and regulation all learning about service design.

Now the course is over there is a lot to digest from all the learning we have had this week. Heledd is keen to continue the work with all the staff that attended, as well as colleagues that have done the Service Design in Practice course.

Looks like we’re ready for our very own Service Design community?

#improving our services - one service at a time.

In times of reduced budgets, attending any training course can feel like a luxury, but we feel that the lack of training can also be very counter-productive. We’d argue that the cost of bad services is bigger in the long term!

Sign up for flood warnings trio writing sessions

Over the last couple of weeks, Lucinda has taken part in a trio writing case study. Arranged by CDPS and the Welsh Language Commissioner, the aim was to show how we have been using it in practice to design bilingual services.

Keen subscribers will know that our champion Heledd covered session one in the 09/02/2024 Weeknotes.

Some light context for you:

Trio writing is similar to pair writing where a content designer and subject matter expert work together on a piece of content. Trio writing is different as it brings in a translator to make sure the content works for users in both languages.

We don’t want to work against each other like this:

We want to work together for the best outcome like this:

Our trio was:

• Manon, Translator extraordinaire
• Rob from CDPS content designer and all round top guy
• Lucinda, second content designer and ‘subject matter expert’

In session 1 Lucinda presented a mock up of the ‘Sign up for flood warnings’ service she created on figma. Rob and Manon helped critique and reshape the design into a more user friendly journey.

Session 2 focused on the Welsh journey and translation. The team found that the sentence structure in Welsh was sometimes better and clearer than the English. They could change the English on the fly as examples of that came up.

The trio are planning a final get together to run through the journey again in both languages. They will check it all makes sense in context and make any final tweaks.

Other things we’ve been working on:

• James is continuing to work with the Deloitte user researchers on our marine licensing project. His first interview is on Monday!
• Sam spoke about her marine content audit to the rest of the NRW/Deloitte discovery team
• Sam’s drafting content on the new ‘permission to do something on land we manage’ fees
• Sophie has been working alongside Gruff from the Translation team to turn around a rather large piece of work… a new signage process to allow staff across the organisation to request new signs with ease. Thanks Steven for all your support on the content, and of course to Gruff from Translation for turning around this request so quickly!
• Lucinda has continuing to work on screen designs and UX for the new Flood Wales Information Service
• Phil has been sending many, many words to our very hardworking translations team this week. Although it’s still not finished (don’t ask!), most of the tree felling licence form is finally being translated
• This week our new and improved content request form was sent to Translation! Not long now and we’ll have a new form for you to use, which has been simplified in line with user feedback.
• Various pages and documents across the external website and the Intranet have been updated this past week, to ensure staff have access to the latest in our organisation’s policies and information.
• We’re enjoying making new connections in the new Slack group “Defra and friends”

Auf wiedersehen Laura

Lastly, this week we said a ‘goodbye for now’ to our wonderful Laura who is off on maternity leave. The whole team is sending lots of love and best wishes ❤️

Fun fact

Speaking of babies, as this year is a leap year did you know that babies born on 29 February are called ‘leaplings’ or ‘leapers’ - how cute!