Autumn is definitely creeping in, though we’re still enjoying the occasional warm and pleasant day here and there. Here’s the news from the digital team for this week.

  • Team birds (Laura and Phil) had a busy start to the week mapping out the ‘change a species licence’ forms (there are six). They’re also mapping what exactly what can be changed for each licence so they can explore one route in for all users.
  • Sophie and Kim worked through the backlog of work, including accessibility checking documents, publishing reports to the website, updating public registers and supporting with analytics requests.
  • Shaun met with the Planning, Landscape, Energy and Decarbonisation team and expert group to amend and agree the proposed web-guidance on siting electricity grid equipment. This is a multi-faceted, complex piece of guidance which has entailed reviewing existing guidance in related areas and exemplifies why working on a single web-page in isolation can cause issues for users (and content designers).
  • Alex has continued to work through the go-live process for using GOV.UK Pay as an online card payment option. It has been linked to NRW’s WorldPay provider and finance processes for the proof of concept have been finalised. Alex will have a meeting next week to determine next steps to ensure governance is achieved before we officially go live with our first service.
  • Toyah’s time has mainly been devoted to the marine licensing customer platform beta project, continuing work with CGI service designers to map out various parts of the process, carry out a content audit, and generally help out where she can with user research and prototyping a band 1 application form. It means a lot of Teams calls and meetings, but she’s really enjoying being in the thick of it all. Next up is tackling the much more complicated band 2 and 3 licence applications though…wish her luck!
  • Toyah has also started delving into the world of marine licensing exemptions though, as this is a particularly unwelcoming page on our site at the moment, so would benefit from an urgent overhaul. She’s been looking at how the equivalent English and Scottish bodies present this complex legislative content on their websites, and has some ideas of things to try with ours.

To wrap up, a throwback to a post from the NRW blog about the health benefits of getting out and about in nature in autumn. Now where did we put those walking boots..?