Here’s what the Digital team has been up to this week…

  • Mary has piloted refresher Umbraco training with a Comms officer and is now refining what the training covers before rolling it out to other staff.
  • James is creating the user research script to test our new forest management plan online application route. He’s also arranging the user testing interviews.
  • Sam and Jane have been iterating the forest management plan application prototype. They’ve also been doing more work on the wider journey, focusing on task-based content to guide users through the end-to-end application process.
  • Shaun continued with the redrafting of guidance on low risk water impoundments and main river responsibilities as well as adding additional content related to the increase of charges for the new financial year.
  • Laura and Phil have completed the ‘Change a species’ prototype and sent it to subject matter experts, along with a map of the entire service, for review.

The publishing team have been flat out this week:

  • Hannah is working on getting a new “procurements and contracts” strategy published.
  • Mary and Kim have been updating guidance on Umbraco templates to clarify what certain fields mean and remove obsolete fields. They’ve also doing some housekeeping on Content and Media folders in the News and Blogs section to make it easier for Comms team staff to publish web content.
  • Sophie has got several consultations out at short notice and continued auditing evidence reports and guidance from an accessibility perspective. This involves reviewing table regularity, adding alt-text to images and much more. We’ve also had all the usual accessibility checks, public register updates, and changes to web pages and intranet content. We’re all very much looking forward to the weekend!

Heledd spent some time in Aberystwyth this week. Highlights included:

  • catching up with Laura, Mary and Hannah in person.
  • spending time with Ray, Ian and Simon from the leadership group.
  • joining a GIS strategy session focused on how we transform our ways of working - ultimately with the aim of making things better for users. There were lots of overlaps across the different conversations. It’s highlighting again just how interlinked our work is, and the balance we’re trying to strike between team autonomy and coming together to agree priorities and where we need to work collaboratively.
  • listening to the new podcast series Bad Services from Lou Downe and Sarah Drummond - highly recommended. It’s good to be reminded that others are grappling with the same challenges that make designing and delivering better services so hard.