Another week has been and gone, welcome to our weeknotes!

drinks and darts

Bidding farewell to the lovely Catrin…

On Wednesday evening, a group of us from across the Communications, Digital and Translation teams headed into Cardiff city centre for the wonderful Catrin’s leaving do. We had some delicious food and cocktails at the Botanist before heading to FlightClub to play some darts to let our competitive sides shine.

We all had a lovely evening and an even better time spent working together, so we’d like to wish Catrin well in all her future endeavours! You will be missed!

The FWIS-cateers…

the flood team having fun

What do you think was happening here? The answer will be revealed at the end of this section…

Lucinda and Heledd were in Cardiff this week to attend the Flood Warning Information Services for Wales ‘Land and celebrate’ event. The event was to celebrate and reflect on the project so far. Last week the updated Sign up for flood warnings service was ‘soft launched’.

A milestone marking years of effort for the team

Lucinda joined the project in January at the tail-end but will continue in the product team now that the service is in the user’s hands. Next week Lucinda is joining discussions on the next steps. She hopes to push for making changes based on evidence and user needs, to understand how we will measure success, and establish a workflow where design has more consideration earlier.

Nick, the Project Manager, led the day and struck a good balance between project reflection, discussing the ‘what’s next?’ question, and celebratory fun (Image explanation coming soon, promise).

One of the celebration activities was to write a poem about the experience of the project so far. Lucinda’s team MAY have included a sneaky bot member (ChatGPT), but AI outputs are only as good as their human inputting the prompts right? Anyway…

Revamping the water whispers

There once was a system named FWS

Where signals were rather a mess

They brought in new tech, to keep things in check

Now floods are no longer a cause for distress

Glorious, just as terrible as our prompt.

And finally, what was happening in the image at the start of this section? Well, that was a word association game based on the show Wacaday starring Timmy Mallet. Nick wore two baseball caps and spectacles to get into the spirit of things. He also brought in an inflatable axe and plasters for the winners.

Watch a clip of Wacaday on Youtube.

Nick gets full marks for creativity.

Forms standardisation

Phil, Kim and Sam continued work on 93 of our forms work this week, ensuring button text says the same thing, in the same way, across them all.

our form buttons

They also checked that the right theme ‘theme’ has been applied so they look consistent and are up to date.

The next task is to amend some form titles so they describe their purpose clearly for users. Mostly this is about adding a verb (because good services are verbs) and removing internal codes - a carry-over from when they were paper forms.

After that, the save and continue feature on many of our longer forms will be standardised and improved so it works better for users.

There are around 100 forms on our site, ranging from the most used (report an incident) to many that are used under just 10 times a year. We hope to reduce this number significantly as forms are better designed, merged where it makes sense to for users, and simplified.

Still, NRW’s come a long in five years when these were Word forms users had to download from our website, or call us to be sent a copy.

Species licensing

Phil, James and Sam have started improvement work on the species licensing content, beginning with a content audit, ‘as-is’ mapping and desk research into what people are:

  • asking about when they call us
  • searching for as they visit our website
  • doing when they visit our pages

James will be organising internal user research sessions soon with both the species team and customer hub colleagues.

The enduring appeal of PDFs

The team saw an increase in requests for PDFs to be published on the website this week. It has meant we’ve had some interesting conversations with colleagues about why they are not a good idea for the web (accessibility, they can be costly to produce, the user need for them is often not clear and so on).

We think their reasons for creating a PDF and wanting it published include:

  • the belief that a designed PDF has ‘brought [the piece of work] to life’
  • they followed the brand manual, so it’s ok
  • they need somewhere to put a PDF so they can link to it from newsletters
  • they want a place to store all of the output from a project for ‘transparency’

We’ll be chatting more about how we can improve our own guidance for colleagues on what the website is for, and how people use it, as well as how we share this message across teams.

Page titles

We had a few chats about page titles (or ‘document titles’) this week - specifically, where content comes to us as a publishing request and it has a very vague title.

We know that page titles are there to do a thing: they help users and search engines decide what a page is about. An imprecise title helps no-one.

Sometimes we can resolve this easily by chatting through the impact a woolly title will have. Other times, it’s trickier - particularly when the title’s been approved at a senior level.This can involve conversations between several layers of people and take a bit of time to change.

presentation of trends to room of people

Back to the permitting future

Heledd and James attended a workshop looking ahead into what the world (and permitting) will look like in 15 years’ time.

Despite how easy it was to slip into our fears for the future, we managed to keep a positive vibe in the room. It was good to be with a mix of people that keen to collaborate and share their thoughts and debate about:

  • where permitting (and the world) was 15 years ago
  • futures thinking, and trends and predictions by our evidence team
  • we all drew a picture of how we currently see permitting
  • visualised what permitting could be like by 2040 and started to plot some of the key things that need to be done along the way. We love it when colleagues from other departments are championing the need to think about things from our user’s perspective, and recognise how cumbersome our guidance is, and the scope to do a lot more with data. Looking forward to continuing to work with Martyn, Helen, Non and others on improving experience of permitting service users.

Just a bit more about the flood stuff..

This is a huge step in NRW’s transformation journey. They’ve managed to:

  • build a team, that’s committed to improving the product, services and ways of working
  • make it quicker to issue a flood warning - on the old system, it would take anywhere between 10 minutes, to 1 hour to issue a flood warning. Now, it’s around 2 minutes, but could be done in 30 seconds Every time Heledd’s joined the “land and launch” sessions that Nick and Martyn have hosted, she’s been struck by the energy, and sense of fun that’s grown here – as well as delivering an important product. Loved the feedback session from all the team members on each other.

feedback from the group on lucinda

At one point, Nick said “an organisation can choose to invest in its people through learning and development, or they can also invest in their workforce by making their jobs better”. Boom.

What even is transformation?

It seems that everyone has a different view of transformation. You can share your interpretation of “transformation” to help Heledd prove a point (or not) that it’s a confusing word, and everyone has a different interpretation.

presentation of slideshow images

Other things we’ve been working on this week

  • Kim’s published the annual water reports onto our website in a fully accessible format
  • Toyah continues her close collaboration with the marine team to create new improved content for licence applicants
  • We’ve also been updating key content pages such as ‘What to do in a flood’ to ensure messaging is clear and concise for users
  • The publishing officers have also been consulting with SMEs and teams across the organisation to support them in making amends in line with their accessibility audits to ensure all published content is accessible
  • Upgrade testing on the NRW website is coming to an end