Another week, another wild swing between endless rain and brief bursts of actual summer (it’s true, Toyah saw one of them on Monday afternoon - blue sky, sun and everything!). As we slide towards the school holidays people are beginning to take more leave, so the weeknotes may be a bit leaner than normal over the next few weeks.

Fly-tipping

The Fly-tipping Action Wales website will be decommissioned soon, so Sam met with them to talk about how best to bring content across to the NRW website.

We started to think about their different content types which are:

  • Campaign materials for other organisations to use such as leaflets, stickers or social media posts
  • Task-focused content around reporting fly-tipping, or checking if a waste collector has a licence to take away waste
  • Comms content for blogs, newsletters press releases

We also started a record of user needs. This will help us focus on meeting the need clearly, once on our site, in the place users expect it.

And we’re exploring using Citizen Space as a place to host campaign materials instead of file sharing via Google Drive.

A bit more to the left please?

Heledd and Lucinda met with Kerry and Rhys from BJSS and Sparck to talk about how we can make sure Design is considered from the start. It’s great that our colleagues are embracing agile, and committed to a permanent product team for the flood service, but we feel we still have a way to go to make sure we have an equal voice from the beginning.

It was interesting to hear Kerry talk about it with language more familiar to software development - how we can avoid “design debt”, and minimise re-work and bugs for developers. We’re looking forward to a workshop in a few weeks to see how we can make sure that Design is better recognised within the product team and “move design to the left” (aka earlier in the process).

Content Design for Dummies, or, Toyah’s first six months in post

I’m now into my seventh month as both an NRW employee and a fledgling content designer. Having come here from a job more akin to the work of our wonderful publishing officers Kim and Sophie, training my brain to switch modes and think like a designer has proved to be quite the…yes, I’m going to say it…journey.

The fabulous people I’ve been working with (special shoutouts to Sam for her guidance and endless patience, and Sean in Marine Regs for his knowledge and enthusiastic encouragement) are the main reason I’ve stayed afloat (pun intended) as I’ve navigated (pun also intended) the complicated world of marine licensing.

But I’ve also been doing my best to develop my skills outside work time by reading (any excuse to stick my nose in a book), joining webinars and even braving an in-person content get-together over in Manchester. Fellow socially-anxious introverts will recognise this as being quite the personal challenge 😅

Most recently I caught a webinar hosted by Christine Cawthorne from Crocstar, who I know many of the digital team have been fortunate enough to work with. Titled ‘why it takes a content designer two weeks to ask a simple question’, the webinar was a great overview of the process of content design, explained in a really accessible way.

Hopefully Christine won’t mind me sharing her list of the things that a content designer needs to do in order to ‘ask a simple question’…

  • Understand the scenario or problem(s)
  • Gather information about people’s mental models and language preferences
  • Work out the flow of information
  • Write the content
  • Make sure it’s consistent with other content
  • Work out how to test the content
  • Re-write content (sometimes a few times)
  • Check the outcome of the content

Rationally I already knew all these things were involved, but it still blew me away to see them laid out so plainly! It’s helped me to feel less guilty about the fact it took me ages to get to the ‘writing the content’ stage of the work I’m doing. I’d failed to really appreciate just how big the first three items on that list are, especially for someone completely new to the organisation and the complex subject matter. It’s amazing just how much thinking work is involved before you can start to show any visible output.

Don’t get me wrong - I still feel like I’m way too slow at all this, and I have a level of impostor syndrome that you could see from the moon, but baby steps, right? I’m choosing to be optimistic that this time next year I’ll feel very different, with 18 months worth of knowledge and practical experience under my belt. Fingers crossed!

Other things we’ve been working on this week:

  • James and Shaun met with Catherine Hancock from the Land Regulatory Approaches Team to look at how we can improve the farming content on our website.
  • Sophie’s reviewing new learning materials and modules, finding best practice for our team to incorporate in upcoming modules we are looking to create that will help the wider organisation better understand topics like designing content and services, accessibility and so much more.
  • The release for the Umbraco patch has been completed for both NRW and WCP websites.
  • Owain has continued the testing work for the Umbraco upgrade project.
  • Kim has been busy wading through the backlog of publishing jobs.

Fun fact Friday

A rare baby snow leopard was born earlier this month in the Welsh Mountain Zoo, up in north Wales. The snow leopard is classed as vulnerable in the wild, so breeding in zoos helps to safeguard their future conservation - a new cub is exciting news!

The cub hasn’t been sexed or named yet, but we think you’ll agree that it’s thoroughly adorable.

Snow leopard with cub