Engaging bilingual users at Natural Resources Wales

Making the user experience consistent - no matter the language

When demand outweighed capacity at Natural Resources Wales, taking a fresh look at the user experience produced outstanding results.

As the largest Welsh Government sponsored body, Natural Resources Wales (NRW) advises on the country's environment, helping to ensure that all natural resources are sustainably maintained and used now, and in the future. We are passionate about putting people and the environment at the heart of our services, whether that's a citizen, business, partner organisation or our own staff.

We see digital as a powerful tool for better service delivery, and taking a more user-centred approach to designing services is a key part of our digital strategy. Although we already had content design capabilities in-house, demand far outweighed capacity of our relatively small digital team. We also found there was a disconnect between the needs of our users and some of the guidance being produced by internal contributors. There was a culture of creating content and using the website as a library, which meant our website saw little engagement. This impacted the organisation - as resources went into handling calls from customers who couldn't find or apply for the right thing online.

It was clear we needed to boost our content design and strategy capabilities, accelerate the creation of more user-centred content and embed content design practices throughout the organisation.

With that in mind, we appointed a multidisciplinary team with a range of skills including user research, content design, content strategy and service delivery. The group of specialists from dxw, Crocstar and Basis shared our user-centred values, brought agile skills and importantly, could work bilingually.

Different motivations and different needs

Initially, we thought the project would solely focus on content design and delivery to support our in-house digital team and accelerate content creation. However, it soon became clear that additional user research would be required to understand the different motivations and needs of users, as well as gaining a deeper understanding of the issues with the current website and how it could be improved.

A new approach to creating bilingual content

For Welsh speakers, it's very common for services and content to be designed and created in English and then translated. This traditional approach often sees translation towards the end of the content workflow and means the ‘first' language gets more attention - leaving little to no time to iterate and improve the ‘second' language.

Through our user research it became apparent that certain technical terms resonated in one language better than the other, what worked well in English did not always work well in Welsh. So, as part of the content design process we developed a new approach to creating bilingual content: trio writing.

Turning the process on its head, the team formed a content writing trio made up of a content designer, user researcher and translator. User needs were prioritised and married together with insights from the research and examples of where the translated content hadn't quite hit the mark with Welsh speaking users. This meant the right language, not just the perfect translation, was chosen for the content, helping to ensure that our services met the needs of all our users.

Winning hearts and minds

As with every project, there were various key stakeholders and subject matter experts who needed to be brought on board. Through a series of meetings and workshops, we facilitated interactions and created a safe space that allowed people with different mindsets and objectives to understand and listen to one another. This helped us to create a consensus and establish the value of working in a user-centred way, paving the way for us to adopt agile user-centred practices across the organisation going forward.

At the time agile working was still in its infancy at NRW, but as a digital service team we were keen to demonstrate its value. The team established a fortnightly cycle of sprints to effectively manage the project, increase transparency and build a continuous learning environment. This gave us the opportunity to actively test, learn and iterate to gain a better understanding of the service and the needs of users.

We also developed a content and publishing manual that explained how content should be created, signed off and managed. Not only did this provide our digital services team with a streamlined and consistent way of creating content, it also increased transparency around the content creation process.

Creating the right conditions

The work has built a strong basis for NRW's service transformation and the delivery of user-centred services. By working openly and collaboratively with our partners, we built a foundation of trust and established an agile working rhythm that made the most of everyone's expertise. Regularly sharing progress through show and tells helped our subject matter experts gain more understanding of what was happening and motivations of the digital service team. While also reinforcing the digital skills and capabilities of the in-house content designers.

Since the project wrapped up, we've been sharing best practice amongst the Welsh digital and content creation communities. Excitingly, trio writing has been established as a methodology for designing and creating bilingual content, and the Centre for Digital Public Services Wales has since released a book on trio writing to help spread the use of the practice across the public sector in Wales.

Heledd Evans is digital services team leader at Natural Resources Wales