We’re still low on numbers with many team members on holiday. It’s been another busy week for those of us manning the digital stations. Here’s what we’ve been up to:

What do we know?

As part of prepping work for a couple of new projects over coming weeks, Heledd fell into a hole about “known knowns” and “unknown knowns”.

In almost any new projects we get into, it’s guaranteed that we’re looking at a problem we or colleagues attempted to solve or investigate before. I’m sure our organisation isn’t the only one where people have tried (and failed) to get the support needed to solve the problems several times. Things start, things stop. Most often because the conditions aren’t right.

The Known Knowns framework was something that Sarah Drummond shared in the good services course a few months back, and we think it could be useful exercise to gather what we already know, and what we need to find out.

Heledd did a bit of research into the framework, and found several interesting takes, such as this about productive discovery meetings.

And then there is this poem, by Donald Rumsfeld…

The Unknown

As we know,
There are known knowns.
There are things we know we know.
We also know
There are known unknowns.
That is to say
We know there are some things
We do not know.
But there are also unknown unknowns,
The ones we don’t know
We don’t know.

by Donald Rumsfeld

Marine licensing transformation

Toyah gave the second show & tell presentation of the marine licensing project, talking through the new user journey for a band 1 applicant from the point of landing on the website through to completion of the application form.

One of the biggest differences to the proposed journey shown in the first show & tell is that we’ve had to change the way the person is channelled through the process of determining whether their project is actually a band 1 (low risk activity). This is mainly due to timescales and complexity - we’d rather build a simpler functional thing that we can then improve over time, than delay the process by trying to start out with something more complex.

The attendees were pleased with the new content, and we’re all now looking forward to making it live in September ready for use in the real world!

Mocking up

Lucinda has been creating a mock-up of a login system for users managing their flood warning preferences. In reality, this means Lucinda has spent most of the last 2 weeks overthinking tiny details like buttons, symbols, page layout and links. There has been a lot of googling and a lot of open tabs.

Much of the functionality for updating contact information and setting up new flood warning locations is already in place from the internal admin system’s development. However, the layout is designed for a desktop screen, and the language aimed at internal users.

Lucinda has been redesigning this for public users mobile-first. So far she has designed the top level screens, and is now building out the flows for each task.

Alt text

She recently found out that she could open the mock service on her phone to get a sense of how it would look and feel.

On discovering this, she bothered her technophobe mother into having a look. Her mum helped her realise that even the pencil ‘edit’ icon, which Lucinda thought was universally understood, was not as well-known as she thought! Being able to bring up a prototype on mobile could be useful for future user testing.

A shout-out to the digital team members who have helped Lucinda logic-out the overthinking so far! She plans to present the designs to the product team next week.

Accessible gaming – Hell welcomes all

We’ve been finding out about how the team at Blizzard have a “nothing about us, without us” approach to accessibility. Great video here form the User Researcher and the development team about their work accessibility from the beginning, and testing throughout development.

Accessibility in Diablo IV - YouTube

Catching up with Laura

Heledd met with Laura, and baby Isabel who is now 5 months old!

Heledd, Laura and baby Isabel

They went to the Dyfi Osprey centre - nice local food, coffee and wildlife - they saw an osprey, dragonfly and a tiny lizard. The family of beavers were too shy to make an appearance - it’s the first site in Wales to have a licence to re-introduce beavers from NRW.

tiny lizard osprey and nest

It was a chance to update Laura on the changes to the organisation, and have a general catch up.

We look forward to Laura being back in the team in early 2025.

Other things we’ve been working on this week:

  • James has been preparing for the species licensing workshop next week. This session will gather the team’s views about their user groups, the tasks connected to applying for a licence, and the goals and pain points of their users. The collated session notes will form the basis for a discussion guide for user interviews with species licence applicants.
  • Kim has been busy this week working on getting multiple reports converted to HTML while juggling the inbox and backlog.
  • Some of the team met with Brand Specialist Chris to be test subject for the soon-to-be rolled out brand awareness training.
  • We also sent out birthday wishes to our Digital Content Officer Sophie, we hope you had a wonderful day!

Fun fact Friday

Tomorrow (August 17) marks the start of Cat Nights, an ancient Irish legend from a time when people believed in witches. According to the legend, a witch could transform into a cat up to eight times, but on the ninth time she failed to turn back into her human form.

This bit of folklore is said to be where the idea of cats having nine live comes from.