Another busy week in the Digital Team! This is an early edition of the weeknotes because quite a few of us are attending this year’s Gov Camp Cymru on Friday 8 November.

Synthesising and analysing the species licensing user interviews

James has been going through the results of his 13 user interviews about species licensing. He’s been looking for patterns and themes in what our users told us about their experience of getting a species licence.

These are some of the themes we’ve seen so far:

  • Our application forms try to cover multiple job roles and scenarios. This leaves users wading through irrelevant questions and answer choices
  • We force users to duplicate information, e.g. our monitoring form will ask for a licence number and then ask the applicant’s personal details, the type of licence etc. We can match all this information from the licence number alone
  • We don’t give practical examples of the thresholds at which users would need a species licence, e.g. what constitutes ‘disturbing a bat’?

James is also pulling out the best quotes from the interviews. These help bring the findings to life when we present them in a show and tell.

Badger

Improving our ‘Check your flood risk by postcode’ service

James also joined a meeting with web developers this week to discuss making changes to our Check your flood risk by postcode service.

We introduced this service in 2021 and since launch it’s been very successful:

  • It gets around 46,000 views per month
  • It’s fully accessible and gives users a clear HTML text result about their flood risk
  • The negative feedback we used to get about our flood maps has all but disappeared

However, possibly because it is so accessible and easy to use, we’re now getting challenges from property owners that our service is causing high insurance premiums or stopping them selling their home.

We’ve always had a prominent message that our service shows the risk for an area not a specific property:

Check your flood risk screenshot

We’ve also got a section in our Understanding your flood risk results that explains how:

  • We don’t have a role in deciding insurance cover or setting premiums
  • Insurers are free to our data but we advise them that it’s not property-specific and gives the flood risk for an area of land only
  • If insurers use our data, it is only as part of a much wider assessment of risk

But as we know, users tend to jump straight to search bars, call to actions buttons or links. They’re often ‘text-blind’ to the rest of the wording on a web page.

We’re exploring different ways of making the ‘flood risk for an area not a property’ message more prominent to help avoid any misunderstanding from our users.

Learning more about accessibility challenges

Lucinda, Sophie and James attended the ‘Access for All: Building an Inclusive Wales’ event at Spark Building in Cardiff on Wednesday.

The event was organised by the Cardiff University’s Digital Transformation Innovation Institute and the Centre for Digital Public Service and we learned about:

  • research to measure how accessible Welsh public services are today
  • the model of Born Accessible – an approach to designing services that are inclusive from the outset
  • the lived experiences of disabled people

It was a moving experience hearing about the day-to-day challenges that disabled people face when trying to access services in Wales (both digital and physical).

James, Sophie & Lucinda at the Access for All: Building an Inclusive Wales event

Forms standardisation

Sam’s been working through all our forms this week, adding clearer wording for the ‘save and continue’ feature. Users can save their progress in a form, then continue it at a later date through a URL sent to their email address. It’s a feature used frequently, particularly where forms are complex like permit applications.

There are three steps after user selects ‘save and continue later’:

  • instruction (user enters their name and email)
  • confirmation (user knows we’ve sent an email, to click on link to continue and check junk if they don’t receive it)
  • link to form (user receives email and clicks the link)

We’ve made the content leaner at each step so that users can more quickly scan the content and understand what to do.

Waste forms

Sam and Kim worked on tweaks to the waste permit application forms so that users are better routed to questions related to their application. Two brains worked well together to solve this slightly knotty problem.

They also fixed another problem related to email triggers. This meant that the right regional teams (around 14 of them) - as well as a central email address – can receive the right applications for their region.

These often look like simple jobs but this took the best part of a day to resolve.

Working on farming user needs

James met with Catherine Hancock again to try to refine user needs for farmers. This is part of the drive to improve the agricultural content on our website, which is currently scattered, incomplete and poorly linked together.

They identified the following as areas to improve:

  • Information about NRW farm inspections so farmers know what to expect
  • Having more content on our website instead of linking out to other websites, e.g. Welsh Government’s, despite NRW being responsible for that area

Preparing for user research with flood duty officers

James has agreed to interview 8 flood duty officers about their experience of using our ‘Send a flood message’ internal system.

He’s looking at interviewing representatives from each of our duty officer areas. These areas experience different type of flooding due to the nature of their river catchments or tidal systems, so it’s important to understand how this impacts their experience of using the new system.

Gov Camp Cymru 2024!

We’re looking forward to attending Gov Camp Cymru 2024 tomorrow at the Pierhead Building in Cardiff Bay!

Gov Camp Cymru is an ‘unconference’, so attendees pitch ideas for workshops on the day. It’s a fab event and we’d encourage everyone to come along next year.

Other things we’ve been working on

  • Sam has published new content about buying and selling salmon and sea trout. She’s also amended our ‘whistleblowing’ form to try to correctly route users to our ‘report an incident’
  • Owain attended our Climate Literacy training this week. He’ll follow up the training by completing an evidence form and this will make him certified in Climate Literacy