Welcome to April! There’s been a few long hours worked this week, so the extra hour’s daylight has definitely come in handy. Here’s what we’ve been up to.

picture of cherry blossoms in bloom

2025/26 charging content published on the website…

The end of the financial year marks the annual fraught period of activity for the SRoC and digital teams. With hundreds of charges changing across many web-pages and associated amendments to guidance it takes a lot of coordination and effort from staff across the organisation to ensure the website has the latest, accurate information on the 1st April.

Individual charging pages for regimes and their tasks can cause a lot of extra work but going through that pain means it’s much easier for users to work out how much they need to pay, they’re far less likely to phone or email us about it and more likely to pay the correct amount, decreasing extra admin work for NRW.

Working on grants…

Sam worked with the grant team on content for a new grant scheme.

Adding new grant content can be fiddly therefore always gets picked up by the person in the team who first designed the content and form. Sam did a few things in MIRO to make it easier for anyone to be able to work on it:

  • Mapped the current application form
  • Mapped the grant content structure
  • Created ‘how to’ instructions

It took a day, but should be worth the effort – it documents idiosyncrasies, could help others in the team learn and helps get work done when people are on leave.

Permissions update…

This week we were asked to unpublish the ‘Apply to use the land we manage’ service.

This is while changes are made to how the organisation receives and processes the applications. This isn’t something we get asked to do very often (and it didn’t feel all that comfortable when we first got the news). But, talking it through with the relevant colleagues, they explained that it’s hopefully just for a short time while they make a few changes internally.

So, for now, we have unpublished the apply page and its related guidance and replaced with a “service unavailable page”. We considered unpublishing ‘check if you’re allowed to use land we manage’ but then decided to keep it live – it’s useful for those that don’t need permission.

We’re hoping to be able to re-publish all the pages by 1 May. The comms team have published a blog about the changes being made.

person reviewing user research sticky notes

Conducting good user research and why it matters…

Upon completing her CPDS User Research in Wales course last week, Sophie has been looking at new ways to integrate the learnings from the course into her day to day life.

Some of the key takeaways from this course that Sophie found interesting included:

  • Good field research helps us empathise with and understand our users and their needs. It’s important that we don’t conduct user research to confirm our own beliefs, because we don’t need to agree with the users’ perspective to come to see it precisely as they see it.
  • Wherever possible, research should be conducted in a home or work environment, where researchers can analyse behaviour within context. When seen out of context, users often forget to tell us about things that are important to them. This is because they forget about other devices they use or other applications they use. But in context, those objects act as triggers to remind them of the way they behave.
  • The best field research provides an in-depth understanding of users. Group research can be much harder to glean that understanding. In groups, people often conform around the group consensus, which can limit the unique insight shared during the session. This means you won’t detect differences between people as you would in a 1:1 setting.
  • Good field research reveals similarities between participants, but it also highlights the differences too. Our users are not a single, homogeneous group, and it is wise to be suspicious of research that depicts all users as motivated by one sole factor or perspective.

Other things we’ve been working on…

  • Another week of publishing new content, updating old content and removing out-of-date pages from the Intranet and website. One of the busiest weeks of the year is now behind us, which is a huge relief – and we’d like to thank the organisation and subject matter experts for their patience with us as we worked to complete everything that was required by 1 April 2025.
  • Kim and Alex have been working on a project to migrate all of our content requests from smart survey and MS planner to be managed by the Hornbill system. This service went live on 02/04/2025 with multiple requests being processed and no negative feedback. This move will automatically allocate our workload to the correct queues and drastically reduce the administration burden of copying data from different systems.
  • Heledd enjoyed a couple of days in Cardiff catching up with some of the team for end of year reviews.