Improving the links between our flood services
By designing end-to-end services, we can help users achieve their goal in a single journey.
Providing a seamless, end-to-end service is vital for helping users do what they need to do quickly and efficiently. Our existing flood warning and information services have been designed and developed over many years, by different teams with different needs in mind.
We are always looking for better ways to link our flood warning and information systems and services into a coherent service journey for our users. The Government Digital Service (GDS) push delivery teams to build end-to-end services — thinking about how the user interacts with the systems and services, and what their needs are across different channels.
We have begun to look at how we can create more seamless experiences for our users of the flood warning and information services. Text messages have always been a key component of the flood warning service — we use texts to notify our users when warnings have been issued to allow them to take the appropriate action. Last year, we added additional information to the text messages, providing a link between our texts and our Interactive Voice Response (IVR) service.
We recently began testing new short links in our text messages. In the past, we had a generic bit.ly link. Using a generic bit.ly link had several disadvantages:
- We received feedback that users didn’t trust the link as it didn’t look official — this was backed up by the low click through rates we observed
- When the link was clicked, it would take the user to the Flood Information Service homepage, where they then had to search for the specific area themselves
We have now registered a short custom domain, floodline.uk, to match our Floodline service branding and have created new bespoke short links for all the flood warnings areas in our Cumbria and Lancashire operational area so we can test this new approach.
When a user clicks this link in a text message, they will be taken directly to the relevant flood warning information on the Flood Information Service. This will dramatically speed up the process for users and they can get the full information in a single click.
What’s next?
We will be monitoring the user take up of this new feature using Google Analytics and reviewing any feedback that comes in from users. If successful, we will roll out these new short links to all flood warning areas in England. We will also be working with colleagues in Wales to see if they also want to adopt this approach for their flood warning text messages.
Joining up our various channels is something we will be focusing in the coming months as we continuously improve our services.
You can sign up to our free flood warning service on GOV.UK, or by calling Floodline on 0345 988 1188.
