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