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