Spring has sprung! As the sun shines and the flowers bloom, our team has been looking ahead to an exciting year full of digital projects.

Despite lots going on, we’ll aim for brevity in this edition of our week notes, but you get what you get when you involve a long-in-the-tooth content designer (Shaun).

Let’s take a stroll through the highs and lows of our week in our Digital Team’s week notes.

new bulbs growing from the ground for spring

A little bit of spring cleaning

Sam and Phil have been planning ahead for our team to allow us to achieve the most with our team’s limited capacity. We’ve identified clean up work needed for the back end of Umbraco, which would save our team and the communications team a great deal of time when using the media library.

We expect to update this in the next few weeks, to ensure our media library is up to date and aligns with the front end of the website.

beach with seagulls flying over the waves

Marine licensing transformation project

With the whirlwind Deloitte discovery project getting smaller in our rear view mirror, we’ve been getting stuck into our own marine project work using all the great insights from the user interviews and NRW workshops. We’re developing a road map to outline what we’ll do now/next/later in terms of areas of focus, and hope to share this soon.

Heledd and Toyah joined the Marine Regulatory Policy and Approach Team (MRPaAT) during their recent in-person get-together in Bangor. The team (affectionately referred to as ‘Mr Pat’) is responsible for supporting and leading the development and continuous improvement of the marine licensing service.

Heledd explained our digital team structure and ways of working, and each MRPaAT member then outlined the area(s) of marine licensing that they are working on reviewing and improving. It was great to get an insight into the wide scope of their work - there’s a lot to do, and only a small team to do it (#relatable).

Toyah will be working very closely with the ‘Mr Pat’ folks, so found it hugely helpful to meet everyone in person as this work begins in earnest. She has since begun collaborating with the band 1 specialist (Sean) to further develop the band 1 application form ideation work that she and Sam have done so far.

Separately to the MRPAaT get-together, Sam and Toyah also joined a workshop held for everyone involved in the marine licensing process. They introduced the digital team and our ways of working, and gave a brief overview of their design ideas so far. The workshop was the third in a series designed to get the various teams involved in considering how the licensing process can be enhanced to make it more efficient for both NRW staff and applicants. Our short presentation was well received and we’re really looking forward to working with everyone!

A busy week of publishing

Sophie and Kim have been publishing content on our intranet to promote the launch of our new learning management system for staff at the organisation. We worked alongside the communications team to update tiles and links to ensure users are signposted onto the updated content.

Keep an eye out for the new content and let us know if you have any comments!

Installations application form and guidance

Shaun is closing on the final stages of the new digital form for installations. We’ve talked about it before in week notes but it’s significant for the fact that we’ve tried to create a digital version of this form a couple of times before and found it was too long, for too many different users and asked for the same things numerous times in varied ways.

Working with permitting and subject matter experts we’ve completely redesigned the form – it’s now significantly shorter, contains no repetition and will hopefully be easier for users to complete and easier for permitting to process.

We’re hoping that by the time these week-notes go to press, the final version of the form will have been sent to translation.

There’s a lot of associated guidance for environmental permits and installations. We’re having to take a phased approach to reworking this guidance as some of it is related to wider environmental permits than just installations and some of it (hydrogen production) is more specific than just installations.

picture of a brainstorm with icons to show feedback and concepts

Permit Reform Group

On a related note to the installations application form above, James has been gathering user feedback and user research about permitting to share with Permit Reform Group.

The Permit Reform Group are looking at making the permitting process more efficient and easier for all involved – a huge task considering the number and variety of permits we issue.

By starting with the user, we’ll be able to understand and address current frustrations for applicants from the outset.

Septic tanks and water discharge permits

We had another piece of website feedback from a user confused about registering their septic tank. This is complicated for several reasons but mainly because registering for a septic tank is in fact applying for an exemption for the need for an environmental permit for a water discharge.

The two things are the same but organisationally we think of it as applying for an exemption, whereas septic tank owners think of it as registering their septic tank.

On the website we call it registering for a septic tank (because the website is a service for users, it’s written from their perspective) but when they click through to the hard-coded application process it’s suddenly called ‘Applying for an exemption’. Of course, this causes confusion. It’s worth highlighting here because it’s a trap we can all easily fall into when we’re too close to the subject.

The average reading age in the UK is apparently nine years. The average intelligence of a border collie dog is comparable to that of a seven-year-old child. Although he can’t read, Blake is fully aware he doesn’t need an environmental permit for his water discharges.

picture of a black lurcher named Blake, one of our team’s digital mascots!

Tenuous I know but any excuse to raise awareness of Blake as a valued member of the digital team.

Other stuff we’ve been working on this week…

  • James has been gathering user feedback and user research about permitting to share with Permit Reform Group.
  • Toyah began working with the band 1 specialist in the MRPAAT team, which was very productive, with everyone all on board and looking forward to taking this project forward.
  • Owain has been busy with updating the week notes website. Focusing on the navigation bar and the placements of the links when viewing on mobile.