We’ve had a couple of team members away this week but it’s been all guns blazing for the rest of the team!

First species licensing user research interviews

James has been busy holding our first user research interviews to find out about our species licensing service.

We’ve held six interviews this week with:

  • A homeowner who needed a bat licence to change his roof
  • A volunteer who applies every year for a licence to handle bats for conservation
  • An angler who applies for a licence to kill fish-eating birds
  • A Ministry of Defence airport safety manager who needs a licence to scare birds away to prevent them interfering with planes
  • A farmer/head of a shooting organisation who applies for a licence to control magpies
  • An ecologist who works with housing developers that might impact on badgers

Here are some of the themes that are coming through so far:

  • People who need licences as part of their professional role don’t struggle with the process. In many cases they’ve inherited the licence and they copy the details over each year.
  • The people who do struggle are householders or first time users. But our content doesn’t seem to be aimed at this group. It assumes existing knowledge of the process
  • Users want to read simple, streamlined content that’s relevant to them
  • They dislike having to wade through irrelevant information but do so out of fear of missing something important
  • Several users suggested a type of up-front filtering that meant a householder didn’t need to read information aimed at developers for instance
  • Some users feel the current approach isn’t proportionate: there’s the impression that a homeowner replacing their roof has to pay for the same ecological report as a developer building a housing estate. They would prefer a more lightweight, fast-track service for lower risk activities
  • Our charging/waiver system is confusing. Again it addresses multiple audiences and activities on the same page
  • Users want support and reassurance to do the right thing rather than almost ‘threatening’ web content that opens with legislation and penalties. One user told us “You wield a big stick”
  • Users would like to see more lightweight licence renewals instead of having to copy every question from their previous licence but change the dates.
  • Users would like longer licences, as often the need for a licence doesn’t change from year to year

We can already see parallels with user research we’ve done on our other services.

We’ve got another seven interviews scheduled for next week and we’ll keep you posted about the findings.

Bat

More frequent blogging

We have our ups and downs with writing blogs.

We’ve been focused on contributing to regular weeknotes for well over a year now, which has been a good way to quickly reflect on what we’ve been doing.

Blogging is always on our to-do list (so much to talk about) but maybe we’ve felt that it’s difficult to find the time for writing.

Inspired by DEFRA’s recent blogs on their forms work, we’ve fired up the blog machine again.

With a focus on problems we solved, outcomes and next steps, Sam’s delivered the first one: how turning six long forms into one helps our users.

Person working at a laptop

Marine licensing transformation

With the new band 1 application form live on the site, Toyah waited semi-patiently for the first submission to come in from the real world (as opposed to the copious number of test submissions we’ve done over the past few months). This week, that finally happened - huzzah! - and she breathed a sigh of relief to know for sure that the form is functioning correctly. No, you’re paranoid!

We now need to wait for the licensing team to assess the application and tell us whether it had any issues that might mean the form needs tweaking further, or if (as we hope) it’s resulted in a higher quality application. If it has, then it means they’ll be able to process it more easily and reduce the overall turnaround time. Fingers crossed!

Toyah is now turning her attention to the licence variation form, which already exists in an online format, but - as was the case with band 1 - is a ‘lift and shift’ from an older paper copy. Though not a very long form for applicants to wade through, there is still plenty of room for improvement, along with the accompanying explanatory content.

2 seaguls

Send a flood message drop-in sessions

In the last two weeks the Flood Warning Information Services for Wales (FWISfW) team have been travelling across Wales holding drop-in sessions for users of the ‘Send a flood message’ internal system.

‘Send a flood message’ is the system duty officers use to issue flood alerts and warnings. The new system went live in July 2024. The drop-ins are the first of many with the purpose of hearing user feedback on how the system works in practice. Lucinda and Heledd joined the North West session this Tuesday.

Here is some of the feedback about the system:

  • Situational ad hoc text is currently only able to send in English. The team are passionate that this should be available in Welsh.
  • The ability to see reporting of all messages issued would be helpful for the team. They currently manually update a spreadsheet for each message sent.
  • Some of the text templates are too similar. They think it would be better to have less templates so that messages stay consistent.
  • The team would like more communication on what happens to their feedback and progress.

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The FWISfW team are taking away comments from the sessions across Wales to feed into backlog tasks for exploration.

The plan is to hold these sessions again in January. With the system being so new, and with the seasons only just changing, there hasn’t been a lot of opportunity to use the system in practice.

The event also gave Lucinda and opportunity to catch up with Tom and Kim. They will be joining her in discovery workshops next week to explore managing flood message content.

Other things we’ve been working on this week

  • After completing climate awareness training last week, Toyah is now working on her evidence form to become certified as ‘carbon literate’.
  • Lucinda has been running through the upcoming ‘Sign in to you flood warnings account’ making sure all the translations are done. The biggest challenge is making sure all the error messages and validation text is covered.
  • Our forms are one step closer to getting their own domain. Lucinda has been informed the request for the domain is going for approval next week. All fingers crossed!
  • Sophie and the team have continued to work on the upcoming Learning Management System content. The next steps will be to review the outlines they’ve created to ensure the activities meet the key learning objectives for the module. They’ve been collating and anonymising real-life examples to help attendees get practical experience to better understand the learning topics.