As the cold February weather carries on, we haven’t left the weather diminish our spirits!

Website upgrade

Since June 2024, Owain had been busy working on the website upgrade for both the Natural Resources Wales (NRW) and Wales Coast Path (WCP). A multidiscipline team had been created with BJSS to complete this work, with Owain in the role of Test Lead for the project.

Before the upgrade could commence, we are required to produce a test risk calculation for each of the websites. This would dictate the level of governance and test coverage required for this project. With this in hand, the test suits and around twelve hundred test cases had been created and would be used as the pass criteria to ensure that each component of the website is working as we would expect it to.

Once those test cases had been completed, along with compatibility and accessibility testing. Owain was in a position to create the test summary report for the sign off. Without this report, the website upgrade wouldn’t have been able to be completed.

When we had received the final sign off, we were able to perform the release to both websites. With WCP being completed today.

An effective way of gathering quick feedback on services

This week Lucinda spent some time working on our job application forms. The backend of the forms contain a bit of trickery to make sure sections link together, but responses stay separate. For example, there is a section that contains equality monitoring questions which need to be optional and anonymous. In the past, Lucinda thought it would be too complex to add a feedback survey to the end of this journey, but after a bit more thinking, was happy to find it was a simple thing to do.

Adding the feedback survey to the end of an application form is a pattern we have used in other services, and is surprisingly effective. After submitting an application form, the applicant is asked if they would like to give feedback.

The users are welcome to skip the survey, and many do, but the uptake is surprisingly high. Around 30% of users choose to give us some quick feedback.

This percentage seems to be a consistent trend across the forms using this pattern.

Before asking the user directly after the form, we had a feedback link on our website or confirmation email. The uptake on this was much lower.

We ask quantitative (how was your experience of the service on a scale) and open questions where the user can be specific about their experiences. We have also added a question asking the user if they would like to take part in user research. User research is something we can do in the future, and would be a good insight into how a user feels about the full service (not just the application form).

Other things we’ve been working on

  • Lucinda and Tom (product owner in flood team) held a workshop this week. They invited developers to feedback on some early wireframes for a future feature that will help manage the content of flood messages.
  • The team attended a session to demo Figma and how it can be used to design services (can be removed if anyone writes this up in more detail)
  • Lucinda has been working on a tool to help our staff triage incident reports.
  • Phil, Sam, and Alex had a call with our form builder account manager. We chatted about adding an address look up tool and a tool to check companies house records. This data would be ‘pulled’ into our forms from what’s known as an API. An API (application programming interface) allows different software components to communicate with each other. We are now investigating this to see if we can make it happen
  • James gave a presentation to the Permit Reform Steering Group about our species licensing user research. He’s also been working with Deloitte to capture the user needs from our marine licensing Alpha.
  • Shaun has been working with the River SAC team on the new water quality assessments under the Water Framework Directive and electricity grid planning advice for planning authorities.

Fun Fact

Centuries before we taste the first chocolate bar, cacao, or cocoa, was mixed as a beverage – albeit to a mixed reception. But far from being the sweet drink we know today, the Mayan version was decidedly savoury. Cacao beans were ground with maize and then mixed with water. It could also be flavoured with allspice, vanilla and ‘ear flower’. The chocolate mixture was then poured between two vessels from a height to create a foaming drink. The Aztecs would embellish this beverage further by adding chilli powder and achiote giving the drink a scarlet hue. Sometimes they would even boil the liquid to create a primitive version of the hot chocolate we know today.