Catch Recording Service

 Marine Management Organisation, Defra Group

Marine Management Organisation (MMO) is an arms length body of the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs. It regulates marine development and UK fisheries management. The MMO has seen an increase in it’s remit following the UK’s exit from the EU.

Background

To secure the export of shellfish to the EU, the MMO along with fishing authorities in Wales and the Isle of Man required fishers in under 10 meter vessels to provide landing data for catch they retained for over 24 hours before landing. Since 2019 fishers had been required to provided data on their catch using the Catch Recording Service, but there was no functionality to record the landing of retained catch.

My role

• Design a solution to the business problem whilst improving user experience

• Achieve stakeholder buy-in from 3 fishing administrations for the proposed design

• Build a high fidelity prototype, test and iterate it ahead of development

Introducing prototyping and user centre design to the team

The MMO had no experience of testing prototypes with users, or of iterating designs based on user insights. Traditionally, services were only presented to users after development in preparation for launch.

On the Catch Recording Service I wanted to work differently. Constrained by MMO’s waterfall development process, I worked with the team to create a design process that would allow end users to affect the design prior to build. To do this, I introduced prototyping as a way to iterate designs quickly and cheaply without developer time. I chose Mural to paper prototype first, validating successive designs with colleagues in all three fishing administrations. Once I had stakeholder buy-in I moved to a wireframe prototype in Figma for testing with external users. I purposely chose to mirrored the app version of the Catch Recording Service because this was used by 80% of the fishers.

Without a content designer on the team, I sought external support. I engaged with the Defra group design community, taking the prototype to design critiques to iterate and improve ahead of each round of user testing.

I worked with the user researcher to test with fishers via MS Teams and on the quayside at two locations. Testing on location helped me to further understand the context in which the service would be used and led to usability improvements throughout the service.  

First design

I engaged with staff in MMO, Welsh Government and DEFA Isle of Mann to co-design the first iteration of changes to the Catch Recording Service. This allowed me to achieve buy-in for the changes and ensure the data collected on retained catch would meeting the needs of all three administrations.

The design introduced a new branching question at the start of the journey that would direct users down one of three paths:

1. only landing today’s catch

2. landing today’s catch and retained catch

3. only landing retained catch

Findings and design iterations

From first round of testing with fishers I observed that journey 2 - landing today’s catch and retained catch, took the users far too long to complete. It also caused confusion for most users with varying interpretations of what the journey was for. Although journey 2 had been the fishing administrations’ preferred way of catpturing the data, seeing the result of the user testing helped me to encourage them to consider their needs against the needs of external users. As a result, I achieved buy-in to I remove it completely ahead of the second round of testing.

I made significant changes to the content:

• reduced words on screen to speed up the process for fishers

• changed how the initial branch questions was worded to remove any ambiguity

• Streamlined the submission page to enable quick access to the service

• Introduced clearer help text to support new users

Finally, I made changes to existing screens to improve usability. Fishers told me that the port and fishing area values remained consistent each time they fished. So I focused on speeding up data input on these screens by allowing the user to save a port and fishing area as a ‘favourite’, promoting it to the top of the list.  

After the changes made following the first round of testing, version 2 tested significantly better. Following the research sessions, I made some minor changes to the content to further reduce cognitive load and support user needs. But the overall journey performed very well, and remained unchanged as the prototype moved into development.