Flood Forecasting Centre Flood Outlook is changing

The Flood Outlook provides a flood forecast for the coming month in England and Wales. It is issued twice a month.

Over the past 18 months, we have been working with our users to make our Flood Outlook service more useful.

The result is a redesigned, clearer, and more modern looking product, supported by new training materials.

This work responds to:

  • an increasing demand from our users for longer term forecast information

  • our Strategic Plan purpose of 'We evolve our services to maximise their value'

Product development

We have based the changes on extensive user and prototype testing. They include:

  • revising how we present the flood forecast to support better decision making

  • redesigning the front page so you can find the most important information quickly

  • reorganising the layout so that complementary information is now grouped together

  • presenting the information in a clearer and modern style

  • introducing a navigation bar so you can move around the document more easily

The Flood Outlook will continue to be based on a national scale assessment to provide an overview for England and Wales.

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 f

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