The Environment Agency’s flood digital service is used by the public to check for local flood warnings by location as well as current river and sea levels.
We spoke to the agile team that developed the service about how they are continually improving it based on feedback from users.
This short film is going to be one of a several that we show about the flood digital service. There's also a text transcript below, if you’d prefer to read one.
What is Flood Information Service?
Frazer Rhodes, Service Owner: Flood risk is one of the biggest kind of natural risks that people face in this country. People need to find information during those incidents so they know how to respond, how to take action, how to prepare for flooding and how to reduce the impact to themselves their family and their livelihoods.
Helen Eden, Delivery Manager: You can actually go and see an immediate flood risk. It’s a facility for you to go online to trusted sources to find out what your flood risk is.
Michael Lyons, Content Designer: It’s a very wide reaching service that touches so many different types of user. The types of needs we have are so varied. They can vary between someone at the height of a flood situation; a flood incident where they have 2 metres of water in their house or their business - they need to know where to go to get answers pretty quickly; to someone perhaps considering buying a house.
Frazer Rhodes, Service Owner: We recognise its worth investing in our flood warning and our flood forecasting and anything we can do to reduce the impact of flooding.
Helen Eden, Delivery Manager: Because it is a natural risk that people are facing in their own homes, it’s a very real tangible problem that a lot of people have to face in their lives – there are real dangers that people need to be made aware of. Lives are at risk.
Deb Summerskill, Product Owner: Sometimes the flood warnings are issues with say one or two hours’ notice. Sometimes they might be issued with quite a few hours’ notice. But they need to know about the website and how to use the website to get that information – so it’s just going out to communities, explaining what we do, explaining what’s available.
Liam Curry, Test Specialist: We need to ensure that we are maintaining a good standard of service. Every change you make to a service has a possible knock on effect. My role is to ensure that the changes we make reflect the user requirements so that we actually get the benefit of the change – that the change has no knock on effect to any other part of the service.
