What we’ve been doing this week

  • James has been analysing the feedback from our Smartsurvey forms. We’ve got hundreds of responses and some patterns are already emerging. E.g. in many cases the final CTA button is labelled ‘Continue’ not ‘Submit’ so users don’t realise that they’re submitting possibly incomplete forms. Users can’t find the right form or end up filling in the wrong form. There is a lack of clearly defined parameters about what users need to include in their answers. Users are confused by irrelevant information in the forms. Users can’t see the questions up-front to prepare their answers.

  • Lucinda and James met with the Flood Warning and Informing and Flood Risk teams to create better messaging for when an address isn’t in a flood warning area. At the moment we mention that the area could be at very low of flooding. But we’ve found inconsistencies where our risk maps may show areas outside flood warning areas as at higher risk than ‘very low’.

  • Hannah did her first accessibility audit of our board papers (failed!)

  • Hannah also finalised the prep for our volunteer days next week! Bracken bashing in the north, food bank in the south

  • The customer platform project is gathering speed, with Toyah joining various meetings, workshops and design huddles. She’ll be working closely with service designers on developing the private beta over the coming months.

  • Toyah has also been working on a new iteration of the band 1 marine licensing form, which has been live since September last year. This includes tweaks requested by the licensing team to ensure better quality applications (and therefore reduced processing time), and readying it to go live with GOV.UK Pay.

  • Sam met with CDPS about getting ways to get more closely involved with their service patterns work.

  • As part of the wider customer platform project Alex attended a show and tell for Defra Form Builder. NRW are investigating what is the most suitable technical solution for all of our form requirements.

What we’ve learned about

  • Lucinda gave Toyah and Kim an introduction to Figma, a tool for designing, wireframing and prototyping, and explained how she uses it within her flood work. Kim and Toyah are now going to spend some time having a go (in a safe sandbox environment!) to get used to using the NRW design system.

  • Hannah had training on Smart Survey 2i checks, and started working her way through them

  • Design huddles have been fab. We’ve chatted content audits, including how we highlight instances of using different words in different user touchpoints to say the same thing (and how confusing for users that is) and ‘warning’ type content in forms – ‘if you don’t do this, then we won’t be able to process your application’ - versus clear upfront guidance.

Coming soon

  • Figma training will continue with looking at how to build working prototypes.

  • Gov Camp tickets will be land next week!