Happy Friday 13th – We hope you all have spooky weekends planned…

This week, the rain has one again returned to Wales and so have all the people from their holidays! We’re glad to have most of our team back from their leave, especially as the number of content requests we have received has begun to increase again.

This time of year can be a busy time for teams looking to update content and create new resources, but to help get your request actioned quicker, it might be worth refreshing your understanding of our accessibility guidance and website proposition.

photo of a beautiful Welsh forest

Reviewing feedback to inform future updates

We’ve been making our website more user friendly with improvements across content and refining our feedback process to allow customers to share their experience to help shape future updates.

One of the new and improved online forms that our team has been working on, the incident reporting form, has received a great deal of feedback in just a few days.

screenshot showing the breakdown of feedback from users

We were pleased to see the form has been well received and that users are finding our services clear and easy to understand. Around 35% of people reporting an incident chose to leave feedback, and more than 85% of the feedback reported a positive experience. We’ve also been reviewing the negative feedback to further improve the service.

Well done Lucinda and team!

Species service discovery

Work’s been intense and interesting this week as we delve deeper into the species service (particularly around licensing).

James ran an internal user research session with the customer hub team, our front line staff dealing with calls and emails every day.

Phil and Sam have been gathering insights from website feedback, form feedback, analytics, records of customer contacts.

The wider team have been analysing reasons who applications for a species licence are rejected.

It’s all helping to build the picture to identify pain points and opportunities for improvement.

photo of a deer looking around the corner of the hedge

Form standardisation

Work moves slowly but steadily on forms standardisation where we’re aiming to standardise common elements of our forms so that:

  • users get a similar experience no matter what permission they are applying for with NRW
  • it’s easier for us to build new forms in future as we will have standard patterns to use
  • we’re more ready for the day when our forms can integrate with a CRM

This week Phil, Sam and Kim agreed to focus on standardisation of personal details (name, address, email and telephone number). We’re using the GDS Design System to guide us, so will be going with:

No title Separate first name and last name fields so that we could reliably extract parts of a name Address line 1 Address line 2 (optional) Town or city County (optional) Postcode Email address Phone number

The vast majority of our forms are transactional (someone needs to apply for something), so these are the ones we’ll be focusing on. We won’t be touching forms that we have used to build a decision tree. A good example is the one Laura, Lucinda and Sam worked on check if you are allowed to use land we manage– this is entirely self-service so we collect no personal data in the form.

two frog figurines sat in a chair discussing their progress

Other things we’ve been working on…

  • James ran a workshop for the Customer Hub to find out more about the species licence calls they get. This information will help him design the discussion guide for future user interviews with licence applicants
  • Kim, Sam, and Phil are continuing to work on the form standardisation project. This week we have been focussing our attention on the name and address fields and the submit and get a copy of your application area of the forms
  • Phil has been chatting with the felling licence team to try and understand more about how our users change their felling licences.