Happy Friday! Welcome to another week of the Digital Diaries at Natural Resources Wales.

This week we have been very busy travelling, networking and workshopping - which has been a lot of fun, but has left us all feeling quite exhausted!

photo showing the digital team collaboratively working at their away day

A Digital day out!

Earlier this week, our Gogs (North Wales based members of our team) all travelled down to our South Wales office for a team get together. It was the first time that we’ve had so many digital, data and technology people all in one place, talking and sharing ideas together.

It was an opportunity to share our views on the website and customer platforms, and consider supporting technology that allows us to deliver services that meet the needs of service users. We even got a “complaints” session, to capture all our current frustrations.

We had a wonderful time getting to know new faces we wouldn’t normally work alongside, and of course sharing new ideas with one another. The energy in the room was great, with important discussions around customer viewpoints, the current state of our services and how we might best prioritise quick wins.

collage of post-it notes from the team

Some exciting ideas were born from the collaboration between teams, and it was great to be in a room full of people considering the user journey and how we might best support users in completing a task on our website. Suggestions included trialling a new ‘simple’ route through an online service, to gather data on how many users would prefer simpler, clearer content.

With plenty of networking and visions of the future, we all left the event feeling hopeful about the direction of our digital services, and how we can work closer with our colleagues in line with the Digital Strategy to 2030.

The next step is for Heledd to work with others to get a plan and support (and probably money!) to crack on with some of the great ideas from everyone in the room.

Big thanks to the team at BJSS and Sparck who helped us to plan and facilitate the day.

collage of worksheets and presentations at hackathon day

Hearing from marine licence users

James and Toyah had a chance to talk informally with marine licence users at our ‘Meet the Regulator’ event last week and ask them about their:

  • goals
  • pain points
  • suggestions for improving our service.

A lot of what we heard supported the research findings in the marine licensing Discovery we did with Deloitte in February and March 2024. Users said they wanted:

  • a way of managing their application online instead of using emails and document attachments
  • regular progress updates about their application like the planning systems offers
  • spatial tools integrated in the licence application to replace lengthy written descriptions
  • the ability to submit Shapefiles with an application.

We also collected contact details for users who would like to speak to us in future rounds of user research.

photo showing Heledd and the team at the hackathon and Indian meal get-together

Communities of Practice: ‘Start Something Good’ Hackathon

Whilst in Cardiff, much of our team took the opportunity to further develop their skills and thinking at the Communities of Practice: Start Something Good Hackathon. The event was organised by the Centre for Digital Public Services and Cwmpas, designed to support attendees in stepping outside their comfort zones to find novel solutions to age-old problems.

Those in attendance were put into varied groups and challenged to apply their diverse skill sets to one of the following complex issues faced by the community of Wales, including:

  • How might we collaborate to increase the use of Welsh language digital services?
  • How might we collaborate to ensure that offline options for public services are available to older people and others that don’t use the internet?
  • How might we collaborate to reduce obesity for future generations?

Throughout the day, we were split into groups and given the chance to collaborate on our respective challenges, with many interesting ideas coming from these discussions. The varied mix of individuals and skill sets allowed us to follow concepts to the end and consider real world applications that could help solve a problem sooner.

Some of the ideas from our groups included:

  • Creating Welsh language content from the start - not translating English services as the final task
  • Ending the binary choice between English and Welsh and supporting learners by helping making it easier to switch between languages
  • Fun Food Network - developing skills and creating nutritious food
  • PubHub - revitalising pubs and taking services into communities.

At the end of the day we were invited to present our team’s findings to the group and our panellists were able to comment and ask questions about our ideas. This was a good chance to reflect and refine our solution and ensure it is fit for purpose.

We really enjoyed this hackathon approach by Cwmpas, and hope it’s something we get the opportunity to do more of - within NRW, and with others.

photo of Toyah, Phil and Sophie at the CDPS hackathon

Scoping out our CMS for improvements…

On Thursday morning, our team got together to discuss challenges we are experiencing on our current content management system with a CMS specialist.

We were able to share our experiences and suggest small tweaks to the platform that would make a great deal of impact for our small team as we work through our ever-growing number of content requests.

screenshot of our CMS training call

Other things we’ve been working on…

  • We met our two new developers over an Indian meal down in Cardiff Bay on Monday night. It was a great way to get to know one another, and you can learn a lot about a person by their favourite curry!
  • Despite all the social events we attended this week, we still managed to publish a number of key changes and updates across the website and Intranet. Please be patient with us as we continue to work through the many requests we receive.
  • We received lots of feedback on our website and through our Hotjar analytics tool this week, and we’ve been able to collate and apply much of the feedback to further improve our website.
  • Owain spent most of this week running through the Umbraco testing pack for a new Umbraco patch for the NRW website.
  • Kim has been a star on the inbox this week, managing the many requests and queries that came into our team while we were away on our training days. Thank you Kim!