#yearnotes 2020: External Digital Services and Flood Digital year in review
2020 has been a year like no other. At times it’s felt like we’ve never stopped being in incident mode, as we went straight from responding to winter flooding to the coronavirus pandemic.
Thankfully, as a team we were already used to working remotely, and supporting and developing many of the Environment Agency’s critical services meant most of our work was deemed a priority.
So, despite getting used to new routines and changes in our personal lives, very little has changed in our work to improve our flood services.
Here’s just some of the achievements from the team this year.
January — March
Work between the team and the Cabinet Office kicked off in January to discuss the regulatory position of mobile alerting. We shared the findings from cell broadcast workshops and an online survey from our work in 2019 in partnership with Fujitsu, EE and the University of Hull.
We also began exploring user needs, business needs, current processes and available technologies for providing an improved warning system.
February saw three named storms sweep across the UK. Storms Ciara and Dennis were just a week apart in the middle of the month with Storm Jorge closing out the month.
Both the Flood information service and Flood warning system experienced their busiest month yet.
Winter 19/20 had already been very wet, with the three months of November to January seeing 117% of the long-term average rainfall across England. These conditions led to widespread flooding and as a result, 25 severe flood warnings and over 1200 flood warnings were issued across England and Wales.
In 2019 we spent time improving the resilience of the Flood information service to cater for increased demand and this turned out to be a wise investment. On 16 February, the service had over 1.1 million users.
This was the flood warning system’s biggest test yet. Between 8 February and 1 March we issued 3,150,858 messages. Our assisted digital channel, Floodline, saw triple the number of calls compared to our next largest flooding event in 2014.
At the peak, there were:
- 8 severe flood warnings
- 277 flood warnings
- 347 flood alerts
We also negotiated new contracts with BT and EE for providing data for our opt-out flood warning service called Extended Direct Warnings. We saved the taxpayers a significant amount on both with contracts and the avoidance of additional licence costs.
In March, the UK government asked mobile networks to send out a UK-wide SMS message to tell the public about the national lockdown. Our user researcher Silvia Grant described how cell broadcast would be a better method of informing the public.
April — June
At the start of April, we supported the Department for Digital, Media, Culture and Sport (DCMS) and Cabinet Office Civil Contingencies Secretariat in a response to the government on the feasibility of introducing cell broadcast alerts as a platform to alert the public about COVID-19 and future hazards and threats.
At the start of May we made an important change to the flood warning system making it more accessible and tackling digital exclusion. User research with the Boston Disability Forum in 2016 highlighted this issue when a deaf user was unable to register for the flood warning service, as it was mandatory to provide a telephone number for voice calls.
Allowing users to decide whether to receive warnings by phone, text or email this means the service is more accessible and more convenient for everyone. The team were pleased to finally get approval to make this change.
This change also allowed us to clean up a lot of poor data — we removed over 300 ‘dummy numbers’ that we know will never be successfully contacted. The flood warning system had tried to contact one of these numbers (022222222222) over 40,000 times this year alone.
When GOV.UK Notify sent its one-billionth message in May, our user researcher Silvia Grant joined Pete Herlihy from GDS to talk about how the Environment Agency uses Notify for flood warnings.
Our content designers Eleanor Shakeshaft and Caroline Vickers also held a workshop about the complexities of communicating flood risk at the 9th annual (and first virtual) government content conference known as ConCon.
June saw another important change to the flood services. Since 2000, details of the latest flood alerts and warnings have been published every 15 minutes. As this was no longer meeting user needs, we reduced the amount of time to around one minute.
We also renegotiated our arrangement with O2 for our opt-out flood warning service, Extended Direct Warnings, further reducing our service costs.
We continued to improve the flood warning system based on user feedback. In June we added a new password reset process and made the registration process quicker.
On 26 June, the last remaining flood alert was removed. This was the first time there were no flood alerts or warnings since 23 September 2019 — a streak of 245 days!
July — September
At the start of July we were thrilled to win a Defra Group award in the ‘Getting it right’ category for our discovery work into an improved flood warning system. On a star studded Zoom call (featuring Alan Titchmarsh and Prince Charles no less!) we were virtually presented the award that “celebrates an individual or team demonstrating professional excellence with consistently high standards in everything they do.”
The team were really pleased to receive the award, particularly in a category which reflected the efforts of our small team working to Agile principles. This demonstrated what can be achieved by trusting and empowering teams and focusing on outcomes rather than processes
In August we teamed up with GDS (Government Digital Service) to blog about how we’re improving our flood services by responding to user needs and applying good service design.
One of the services mentioned in the blog was the Flood information service. This was launched in 2015 and has been continuously improved by the team.
We are currently testing a new design of this service called Check for flooding. Just some of the improvements include:
- making sure it’s accessible to everyone
- shortening the user journey to critical information
- presenting more locally relevant information in one place
- providing information about impacts from flooding to give context and help communities to assess their flood risk
In August, Storm Francis provided an opportunity to test the new localised information with flood wardens in the Calder Valley, who confirmed the impacts as they occurred.
In September the accessibility experts at the Digital Accessibility Centre (DAC) undertook rigorous accessibility testing on the new service to make sure it’s inclusive.
It’s important that everyone can use the service to check for flooding, even when experiencing the extreme stress and anxiety that flooding brings.
Because of this, accessibility has been at the forefront of the design process and DAC were very positive about the changes we’re implementing.
We also continued to improve our flood warning service. We began to develop a way for users to leave feedback after hearing flood alert and warning messages on Floodline. The software that reads the messages out, called Interactive Voice Response (IVR), uses machine learning to generate automatic transcription of recordings for us to review.
At the start of September, we used our knowledge and experience of the flood warning system to start improving the Environment Agency text alerts service which informs staff of incidents. We quickly pulled together a small, Agile team to work for 7 weeks on exploring options for improving the service for users and those issuing the messages.
In late September, the Google Crisis Response team got back in touch with us. We last worked with Google in 2019 when we became the first authority in the UK to launch on the Google Public Alerts platform. This means our warnings now reach more people during times of flooding.
After seeing success in India and Bangladesh, Google is keen to explore how their Flood Forecasting initiative could be applied in the UK, which has smaller, more rapidly responding catchments than India and Bangladesh.
The combination of applying Google’s machine learning, processing power and reach of its platforms with the Environment Agency’s flood forecasting and warning expertise is an exciting prospect which will no doubt develop further in 2021.
October — December
In October, the Italian Department for Civil Protection ran a show and tell on their cell broadcast based mobile alerting service, IT-Alert.
Facilitated by the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office and the British Embassy in Rome, this session enabled the UK cross-government team to gain valuable insights on their preparations for the launch of the service.
Progress of cell broadcast alerts in the UK continued at pace, with attention turning to user testing message content and the behavioural responses to emergency alerts.
We also continued testing with the mobile networks with a public trial of the service in early 2021.
We successfully migrated the flood warning service for businesses, called the Targeted Flood Warning Service, to Amazon Web Service (AWS) — improving availability and resilience as well as allowing more rapid roll out of future enhancements. We can now turn our attention to introducing new features requested by users.
In mid October the final Extended Direct Warnings contract renewal of the year was signed with Three UK. After a positive negotiation process we secured a substantial saving over the previous contract period.
Our work on the Environment Agency’s Staff Alerts service was completed in October. This was a culmination of over 7 weeks of hard work based on user research. We identified clear areas for improvement and challenges in the current service.
By reusing existing skills, experience and code we were able to create an entirely new service from the ground up, based on these user needs. The service was designed to be simple and lightweight, and uses existing government platforms such as GOV.UK Notify and GOV.UK PaaS as well as internal technology platforms at our disposal.
We believe this project has been a great example of how we can create user focussed services in house by being resourceful, flexible and trusting in the team to deliver. We have been sharing our work with colleagues in Defra and have designed our service to be reused by others.
The work to improve the flood warning system continues as we are currently exploring how to manage the data. We have also reached out to internal and external users to help us test the new registration and message creation processes.
To ensure the Check for flooding service can cope with the number of users seen in the February flooding, we undertook complex and detailed performance testing of the service.
Addressing the performance issues identified meant we could continue to invite users to test the service with confidence. We used GOV.UK Notify to send invites to around 1,500 users who had previously left feedback on the service.
This work means we can now look forward to adding links to Check for flooding from the current Flood information service early in 2021. This will help us to learn even more about how the service can be improved to meet user needs.
For example, we have made river and sea levels easier to find after usability testing showed that users struggled to find them
In December we completed the roll out of a new short link in our flood warning text messages. This new link takes users directly to the relevant page on the Flood information service on GOV.UK.
This was made possible by the work we carried out earlier in the year to reduce the time it takes for flood alert and warning messages to update on the Flood information service.
In late December substantial rainfall together with Storm Bella resulted in further flooding and whilst 10,000 properties were protected by defences, sadly over 300 properties were flooded. The flood warning service alerted over 60,000 people and our thoughts go out to all those affected over the Christmas period.
Of course it’s not always the headline-grabbing work that is the most important. Much of the work of the team is on the more mundane activities which need to be done well in order to keep the flood warning system, the Flood information service and the 22 other products and services we support, operating as they should.
We said goodbye to our user researchers Silvia Grant and Samantha Brown, our scrum master Danny Jones and web operations engineer Tom Tant. All were instrumental to our successes in 2020 and we wish them all the best in their new roles. We also welcomed, Neil (developer) Bose (user researcher) and Muzz (scrum master) to the flood digital team together with Claire Product Manger) and Karen (Project Exec) now leading on the next warning system.
As a small team experiencing challenging circumstances in 2020, we’ve continued to deliver value to our users. That is testament to a dedicated group of individuals who focus on the right things and have a passion for what they do.
We say a huge “thank you” to our colleagues in the Environment Agency and DEFRA for all their hard work this year.
