Ahhh, September – leaves change, kids go back to school, and parents share imaginary (or actual) high-fives for making it through another round of summer holidays.

We may be a digital team, but that doesn’t mean we don’t appreciate this back-to-school time of year for the chance to buy new stationery and notebooks…‘just because’. It is a truth universally acknowledged that you can never have too many nice notebooks.

Water, water, everywhere…

Shaun has mainly been working on application form amendments this week, with changes being requested to water abstraction, water discharge and the new installation Environmental Permit forms.

He also met with Tristan Hatton-Ellis, Rhian Thomas and Ruth Johnson with regard to overhauling the water quality content on the site. With new water quality reports in the pipeline (sorry!) and us knowing that this content can be confusing for users, we’ve agreed to audit all the current content while Rhian works on a spreadsheet of user needs. This should put us in a position to match the web content to the user needs and assist us with constructing a new information architecture (website structure) for water quality.

With changes to the way NRW screens applications for water discharge exemptions coming in, Shaun has also been working with Dave Jones on amending the water discharge web content guidance.

Report an incident – small update and review

This week, Lucinda updated a minor part of the ‘report an incident’ form. It was a small enough change but when editing complex online forms things can unexpectedly break.

With this in mind, superstar Sophie stepped in to test it for faulty pathways as well as reviewing the language and style with a fine-toothed comb.

They then shared their feedback as a group and found that many eyes make light work, and before long the new form was looking better than ever.

After the update Lucinda and Sophie had a chance to conduct a bit of a review to consider where the user journey could be improved to help capture accurate and useful information. We began by reviewing the types of incidents that make up the bulk of our reports, which featured pollution (26%), incidents at NRW regulated sites (22%) and interestingly, ‘other incidents’ which made up the majority of the reports at 27%.

Screenshot of the types of incidents results

We decided to dive deeper into the other category to better understand the types of incidents that users were looking to report that were otherwise uncaptured by our reporting form. The following word cloud showed that unpleasant smells were one of the biggest issues that people were looking to report using our form.

word cloud

We will continue to monitor the responses received to further improve the experience of reporting incidents for users on our website.

Other things we’ve been working on this week:

  • Toyah attended a webinar where members of the NRW data and mapping teams showed ways to use FME (Feature Manipulation Engine) in different marine-related contexts. One of the examples was creating a band 1 sensitive sites GIS layer – the very subject Toyah has been working on with Marine Regs! Hopefully this will help us develop that further in the future, to create a better experience for licence applicants.
  • Lucinda, Sam and James attended a series of sessions with Kerrie from Sparck to discuss design workflows.
  • James has been busy analysing the results of the species licensing team workshop, and the feedback from flood duty officers about the new flood warning system.
  • Kim and Sophie have been working hard to get through the backlog of publishing jobs.

Fun fact

Did you know that September originally had only 29 days? It was also the seventh month of -the Julian calendar, not the ninth – and this is why it has the ‘sept-’ element of its name.

In 1752, Britain and its colonies (belatedly) adopted the Gregorian calendar in order to align with the rest of Europe, which meant skipping the eleven days after the 2nd and jumping straight to September 14th. Pretty unlucky for you if your birthday fell on one of those days!