Flood Forecasting Centre has announced that the Flood Outlook is changing

The Flood Outlook forecasts flooding in England and Wales over the coming month. It appears twice a month.

We’ve been working with our users for the past 18 months to improve our Flood Outlook service.

As a result, the product has been revamped to be more clear and modern in appearance, with new training materials to accompany it.

This work is a response to the following:

• Our users’ desire for longer-term forecast information is growing
• ‘We evolve our services to maximize their value,’ says our Strategic Plan.

Development of a product
The changes were made after intensive user and prototype testing. They are as follows:

• To help people make smarter decisions, we’re changing how we present flood forecasts.
• redesigned the top page to make it easier to access the most critical information
• rearranging the layout in such a way that related content is now grouped together
• presenting the data in a more transparent and current manner
• introducing a navigation bar to make it easier to travel across the document
• To give an overview for England and Wales, the Flood Outlook will continue to be based on a national scale evaluation

User research

The changes respond to our user research findings:

• the current product showing ‘low’ risk much of the time and the non-committal language does not support decision making
• the monochromatic colour palette and layout makes it difficult to quickly identify the most important information
• a need for a more intuitive presentation of the forecast based on colour codes
• a request for more information in the 6 to 10 day timescale, and on spring tides

They also incorporate feedback from our hydrometeorologists:

• that the requirement for forecasting ‘significant impacts’ results in a tendency to forecast a ‘low risk’ too often
• a need to be able to communicate known forecast information that may be useful to users
• decreasing the time steps of the forecast for the last 2 weeks to give a better representation of the accuracy of forecasts at this range