We lost the sun again this week as the weather turned cloudier and wetter. But the show carries on in the Digital Team. Here’s what we’ve been up to…

photo showing a cloudy day in wales

Species licensing workshop

James ran an online workshop for our Species Licensing team on Tuesday. Species licensing is the first area that we’re looking at as part of a wider project to make it easier for our users to apply for the right permits and operate legally.

The session captured the team’s views about:

  • Main user groups
  • Most common types of species licences
  • Tasks connected to applying for a licence
  • Common questions from users to the team
  • What users find difficult when applying for a licence
  • Ways to improve the application process

We’ll also be running workshops to capture similar insights from our Customer Hub call centre and our internal expert group, who are part of the consultation process for species licence applications.

We’ll user the insights from these workshops to help inform our discussion guide when we hold user interviews with our main user groups.

Planning how to improve our farming content

James and Shaun met with Catherine Hancock to discuss how we could work together to improve the farming content on our website.

We agreed that at the moment the content is:

  • Badly titled
  • Written from a NRW-perspective
  • Not joined-up

Catherine is going to share her views about a draft list of around 60 user needs for farming web content that Shaun created. We can then take that list to a user group of farmers, consultants and farming unions to get their views about whether the user needs are accurate and whether there is anything missing.

Standardising our forms

Work continues to improve our online forms.

This week Phil has been changing and improving the save and continue message.

Sometimes our users cannot complete the form in one go, the reasons could be:

  • they might have to go away and collect extra information
  • they might have ran out of time to complete the form.

To solve this problem we have introduced a ‘save and continue’ feature. The user chooses to save the form, the form system then emails the user a handy link. When the user is ready to start filling in the form again, they click on the link which goes back into the form.

This all sounds very straight forward, but things are rarely straightforward. We have looked at all our online forms and found the following problems:

  • some of the forms don’t have the save and continue feature
  • some have the save and continue feature and refer to other forms
  • some forms have the save and continue feature but the content is not very clear

Kim, Sam and Phil have created some new content to standardise the save and continue feature.

User enters their email address

screenshot showing the standardised save screen

User gets a notification to tell them they have received an email link

screenshot showing the progress saved screen

User gets an email notification with the link to access the form at a later date

screenshot showing the new notification

Website tidy-up day

We had another website tidy-up day on Friday. This is a monthly opportunity to organise and clear out some of the documents, images and folders that have built up over the years.

Other things we’ve been working on…

  • Lucinda presented to the Flood Warning Information System for Wales (FWISW) product team this Wednesday. The presentation was to show the designs for a future service where users will be able to log in to manage their flood warning preferences. Lucinda had some concerns that the layout, wording and components used could cause some push back, due to it being quite different to designs for internal use (as they should be). Thankfully, the designs were well received and Lucinda had the opportunity to ask the developers on the call about accessibility and possible functionality. The tech lead will now use the designs as a basis to plan future work and sprints
  • Heledd has been helping the Flood Warning Information Service project with project closure: reviewing, writing lessons learned and preparing to the move from ‘project to product’. She’s also been investigating Cookiebot invoicing and real-time parking information for Newborough
  • Toyah has been working our marine licence pre-application content
  • Shaun has been working on changes to rules about water discharges from septic tanks. He’s also been working on an installations charging tools and web pages.