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:
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an increasing demand from our users for longer term forecast information
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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:
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revising how we present the flood forecast to support better decision making
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redesigning the front page so you can find the most important information quickly
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reorganising the layout so that complementary information is now grouped together
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presenting the information in a clearer and modern style
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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:
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the current product showing 'low' risk much of the time and the non-committal language does not support decision making
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the monochromatic colour palette and layout makes it difficult to quickly identify the most important information
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a need for a more intuitive presentation of the forecast based on colour codes
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a request f