Buy a rod fishing licence
Each year the Environment Agency sells fishing licenses to around a million customers generating £22 million of income that is reinvested back into the fisheries and the environment across England and Wales.
Each year the Environment Agency sells fishing licenses to around a million customers generating £22 million of income that is reinvested back into the fisheries and the environment across England and Wales.
The task for team was:
The service failed the following points of a Beta assesment:
Feedback from the asesment included:
The service was relatively straightforward for users but there were a number of areas that could be simpler.
There were points in the flow where the questions were confusing or not relevant
The benefit of providing information was not clearly explained to users, nor is the impact of them not providing the information.
There wasn’t enough evidence that the team have thought about the needs of offline users.
My role in the short term was to take all this feedback and get the service into a place where it would meet user needs, be simple and intuative, and pass a service assesment
Longer term my role was to make sure the whole service was meeting the needs of Anglers and that user research played a bigger part in deciding what the team worked on.
The biggest thing to tackle was the user journey and question sequence. Feedback from GDS centred around confusion over why questions were being asked.
Feedback from users was similar:
It seemed to take a long time compared with previous system
I can't understand why I have to input my blue badge number as well as my age. As you can see I am nearly 82 years old
At no stage,until the very last did I know the cost of the licence
It seemed to take a long time compared with previous system
I started by creating cards for each screen and getting the whole team to have a go at ordering them in the way they thought would work best. This really helped to get everyone involved, on the same page and to see the complexity in the service
We recorded pro’s and con's for each sequence and tested new user journeys with users. The biggest learning for the team was that there was no perfect answer
We did get an idea of the key decision screens that had the biggest impact on the journey putting these screens closer to the front helped create a more streamlined experience.
Outcomes:
Feedback:
The second key thing we had to work on was removing some of the confusion by giving people the guidance they needed at the point they needed it.
Changes to the question sequence helped us do this. We could now make it clearer to users how much they would pay and more importantly why.
Feedback:
Outcomes:
The service passed its GDS public beta assessment and went live in January 2017 taking over £22million from 500,000 transactions in its first 2 months, with an estimated £40million and 1.2million transactions by the end of 2017.
The service won a corporate service's recognition award for “Making it simple” in March 2017 and was shortlisted at the DL100 awards for digital public service innovation in June 2017.
View the fishing licence service promotional video
The panel were particualrly impressed by the way the team have used what theyv'e learned to iteratte and improve the service. In particualr how they had explored different ways of frming questions and different question sequences
Whenever Kevin Cunnington talks about the digital services the government will have built by 2020, he starts by enthusing about applying for a fishing licence online. Imagine CSW’s disappointment, then, when we ask the new director general of the Government Digital Service whether this focus on the gentle riverside pursuit is driven by a personal interest – and he responds with a quizzical look and a laugh. “No...” he says, pausing to check it isn’t a trick question. “It’s just a great application. I’m not a fisherman.
The service has over 94.5% Satisfied or very satisfied user feedback from over 22,000 responses via the on site feedback form, just a few examples of this feebback are listed below:
Probably the easiest website I have ever used to make a purchase. Well done"
Excellent service and really appreciate change to validity from date of purchase
The whole process was very easy. The boxes and questions were intuitive. - - Good effort, hard to see how it can be improved.
Cant see how you could make this any easier
I am a 71 year old pensioner and I Found the site very user friendly and easy to use! -- Top Marks!
Very easy to navigate, and delighted junior licence is now free!
MUCH MUCH MUCH better than the previous post office website.
The easiest application I have ever filled in, absolutely first class and for a pensioner with limited IT skills could not of been better