Roll up, roll up for another instalment of team digitals highly anticipated weeknotes. It’s been another busy week so let’s jump right in…

Working together to complete digital requests

This week, we’ve not let the excitement of an eclipse overshadow our motivation to complete work and clear the Digital publishing backlog. Sadly, our small team said goodbye to some key members earlier this year, but despite being an even smaller team, the work requests continue to be sent in often and varied.

To help us accurately prioritise work, we have redesigned our content request form, to ensure it has pathways to collect all the necessary information needed for a task. We’ve also built specific questions around user benefits and any external or internal deadlines that may alter how we prioritise the work requests, to provide our team some breathing room and realistic turnaround times.

We work closely with the organisation’s Translation team also, and so there is an element of collaboration between both teams. Due to the pressure both our teams are under, it’s essential that we receive work as early as possible to give both our teams enough time to work together to bring a request to life in English and Welsh.

Whether it’s a webpage or a document to be uploaded to the website, there’s quite a bit of back and forth and work behind the scenes to ensure we publish content that meets our accessibility, Welsh language and style guide requirements. Every day working in the digital space at Natural Resources Wales, is varied and a continued learning experience. Another busy but exciting week for our team.

Good stuff about good services

Following the recent training by the School of Good Services, some of the team had the chance to ask Lou and Sarah more questions and get more great tips to help shift our organisation to designing better services!

We often compare stories as a team, and question why so many services are so bad (everywhere). So it was a useful reminder of some of the things that causes of bad services:

It was great to have short discussions with lovely people form Social Care Wales, NHS, Hwb and others that have also been on the training, provided by CDPS recently.

We have even more stuff to read and ponder now, but thanks Lou, Sarah and the team at CDPS for this opportunity. They also said they may write some blogs on some of the other questions we asked - so we’ll look out for those in months to come!

More reading:

Hazardous waste project

Sam and Alex have been busy this week with their continued work on the hazardous waste project. They’ve been working closely with the developers on:

  • some of the gnarly validation rules
  • creating error codes
  • content enhancements
  • tying in the new app to website content journey
  • testing

Other stuff we’ve been working on this week…

  • Owain has been doing some updates on our weeknotes site. With updating the font sizes, colours, tab order and adding focus colour.
  • Heledd joined the Service Design Cymru network session, with guest speakers talking about emotion in design. Fascinating. Recording available to members that sign up to the CDPS community of practice.
  • Phil is working on changing the Environmental Impact Assessment felling register. The register is supposed to keep data for five years. However, it’s been very neglected and it holds data for eight plus years. It’s currently in the old table format and there is a lot of out of date content on the page, which makes no sense to anyone. So lots of improvements to make here.

Friday Fact

There’s been a lot of talk of the eclipse this week but did you know that in ancient Greece, a solar eclipse was seen as a sign that the gods were angry and was thought to be an omen of bad things to come. The word eclipse comes from the Greek word ekleipsis which means “being abandoned”.