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

Species licensing: The flight continues 🐦

Phil and Laura have reopened the nest to continue species licensing improvement work. Their initial focus is the apply for a bird licence application and guidance content. They’ve started speaking to the species team, writing a project plan, and carrying out discovery work to understand user needs and where the bird licensing journey can be improved.

Other things we have worked on this week…

  • On the intranet project, Kim, Sam and Jane have been exploring SharePoint’s out-of-the-box features. Findability has been identified as a major pain point for users so we’ve been looking at navigation options (mega menus versus cascading menus) and search functionality. We’ve also arranged a meeting with colleagues in the Internal Comms team and are looking forward to working more closely with them as the project progresses.

  • Lucinda has been doing a stocktake of design system components in Figma vs Storybook, and checking both for consistency with GOV.UK

  • James met with an external user researcher on our flood warnings project to talk about aligning ways of working. He’s also planning user testing on our intranet to benchmark how easy it is to complete set tasks. This will include getting help from our assisted user group. He’s creating a Miro board to pull together current picture for Insights project. He’s also doing a Data Protection Impact Assessment for our Hotjar feedback tool

  • Laura worked with SMEs to update the felling licence application with new peat assessment requirements. Explored different design options and proposed the clearest approach for users while meeting the changes requested by the business. Also recommended a small update to the start page to keep the guidance consistent

  • Heledd has been busy chatting, shaping, advising and generally trying to bring people together… This included facilitating a workshop with a members of the Management Group and one of the product teams to explore how touchpoints and ways of working could be improved, and how it can be made clearer where product teams need (and don’t need), to engage with DDaT governance groups

  • Heledd has attended a couple of learning / development sessions, including a particularly exciting one on Colour Insights. It was fascinating to learn more about different preferences, communication styles and motivations, and to see the results in practice. Heledd is looking forward to exploring this further with the whole team in December. It feels like a great way to better understand one another, play to individual strengths, and think about how communication and approaches can be adapted when working with different people and teams

  • Shaun has been working on some guidance content and working with subject matter experts to bring in a user research survey. This will contain insights that allow us to build content and services that support users as they complete tasks on our website

  • In the publishing world, Kim has kept the inbox and our queue of work moving forwards, while Hannah and Sophie have been working on several important reports that will be published accessibly on our website in coming weeks

  • Laura reviewed a request to move GN87 environmental conditions guidance from PDF to web pages. After discussing it with the SME, we agreed there is no clear evidence of user issues, so no further work is planned at this stage

  • Mary and Sophie met with Nick and Alix to discuss the next instalment of the DDaT newsletter
  • There have also been a number of 1:1 conversations as part of the mid-year review period