The sun has been shining across Wales this week, and we’ve had a rather positive start to spring. Find out more about what we’ve been up to here…

person planting a pot plant

Celebrating Cultivation Street Week 2025

Gardens and green spaces provide solace, beauty, and a connection to nature. Cultivation Street Week 2025 will take place from the 3rd of March and will run until the 9th.

Cultivation Street Week is an annual celebration of community gardens and the people behind them. It focuses on the transformative power of gardening as a communal activity, highlighting the benefits it brings to local neighbourhoods, from improving mental health to creating biodiversity havens.

Many experts host workshops so find out what’s going on in your local community and attend classes to pick up new gardening skills and tips. Some communities will also be hosting garden tours, workshops and planting days as a way to learn from fellow gardeners.

If you’ve been considering getting involved in the local allotments, or if there’s a vacant plot in your community, it might be time to get your neighbours together and start your own community garden. Here are some low maintenance crop ideas to get you started. Gardening is a great way to grow some friendships while beautifying your surroundings, and it provides considerable wellbeing benefits too.

illustration of a person in a field

User personas, screening questions and more in CPDS’ user research fundamentals course

Recently Sophie has been attending a user research fundamentals course led by the Centre for Public Digital Services. On this course, attendees learn current best practice when conducting user research, and this week was focused on structuring questions, building user personas and the indicators of good field research.

In break out groups, Sophie and her team considered possible users of a hydration tracking app, their behaviours and the importance of screening questions to find the right users for testing.

When testing a user need, the following are some key considerations to take into account:

  • If you showed this need to an end user, would they recognise it as their own need?
  • Does it help you organise and prioritise the work for your project?
  • Does the need describe the problem, not the solution?
  • Will the need stay the same, regardless of changes to technology and existing services?

These questions provide a good foundation for understanding whether the user need that has been identified is clear and accurate. With an unclear understanding of the user, we risk spending time working on solutions that are not fit for purpose and do not support a user in successfully completing their task.

Quote from the session: ‘A quick way to test if you are listening.. If you know what you are going to say before the other person stops talking – you are not listening’

Sophie really enjoyed the session, especially collaborating in break out groups, which facilitated thought-provoking discussions around users and the ‘forgotten’ users from many of the popular apps on the market today.

Other things we’ve been working on…

  • Following the update to the website, Owain has been busy with the upcoming website enhancements. With creating the test plan and test scripts ready for the upcoming busy weeks
  • James has been revising the discussion guide for user interviews about our new ‘Send a flood message’ service. He’s also been working with the Flood Risk team on text changes and UX improvements to our ‘Check your flood risk by postcode’ service
  • Owain had received his certificate for carbon literacy