“Planning permission is confusing, isn’t it?”
I suspect you’ve heard some version of this sentence whenever the topic of planning permission comes up. Any change someone needs to make to their house can lead to this process making an appearance, but does it need to be this way?
We are partnering with multiple local authorities to explore elements of the planning process, to see how we can enhance planning services.
The Digital Service Standard advocates for meeting user needs, by both understanding users and their needs.
As part of this, our team has spent the last few months talking to local planning authorities and a variety of homeowners in Wales to understand their experiences of the pre-application advice service of the planning journey.
In these sessions we learned a lot about what these users needed, and what problems they faced in the journey. Following this, we have analysed and interpreted our findings and identified some improvements we believe will help users of this service.
We’ve combined these elements and created content and designs and formed them into a prototype. A specifically designed version of how we think we could best address the needs and pains of these users. But while we’ve worked with partners in specific areas, another element of the standard is to focus on the current and future wellbeing of people in Wales.
To ensure our ideas work for all of Wales, we’ve decided to build our prototype based on guidance for all of Wales. But to aid in making it feel local, we’ve set things in one of Wales’ most beloved fictional towns...
a screen shot of a webpage with a blue banner with the title Pontypandy council. Below this banner are various links followed by the main body of the webpage titled “Homeowners – how to apply for planning permission”
So, we have a prototype, but how do we know we are getting it right?
Well, much like the builders who work on those home improvements, we measure twice and cut once. By that I mean, we conduct usability testing.
What is usability testing?
Usability testing involves our team taking this prototype to real users of the service and getting their feedback on the designs and content. We want to know how the design makes them feel, if the content makes sense, if it tells them what they need to know.
We do this by talking to the users, learning a little about them, then giving them scenarios and asking them to interact with the design.
We then capture notes of what happened, compare this with other tests and use what we learn to go back and refine the designs.
This means instead of designing something and hoping for the best. We can actually have real people give feedback. These services are for the public, it's only right they have their say in it.
The testing is ongoing at the time of writing and we’re super excited to see what we learn and how we can update our designs to best serve the needs of Wales.
And hopefully after this, there will be a lot less people saying, “Planning permission is confusing, isn’t it?”
Get involved
We are currently looking for homeowners to help us test. If you can spare up to 45 minutes and show us how you would use the website we’ve built, fill in this form.
You’ll receive a £20 shopping voucher as a token of our appreciation.
If you’re interested in learning more about the planning project and would like to receive regular updates on progress, sign up here.
