Post by Cath, User Researcher and Damien, Service Designer, Welsh Revenue Authority (WRA)
Image: Cath and Damien presenting
Recently the two of us took to the stage at The Bike Lock in Cardiff for TransformGov Talks Cymru, co-hosted with Transform Wales. Our topic was designing Wales’ first visitor accommodation registration service. If you missed it, here’s the short version.
Darllenwch y dudalen hon yn Gymraeg
One register, very different businesses
Anyone offering visitor accommodation in Wales needs to register with us at the Welsh Revenue Authority by 31 March 2027. The register will give Wales a reliable national picture of visitor accommodation, and it lays the groundwork for the Visitor Levy. We also wanted it to be simple enough for anyone to complete correctly, first time.
No pressure, then.
Because the service is brand new, there was no playbook. So, we talked to the people who’d actually use it: self-catering owners, campsites and glampsites, hotels and B&Bs, festivals, bunkhouses and hostels, youth residential centres, online travel agents and property management companies. It soon became clear that they do not describe their businesses in the same way:
- A hotel’s “unit” is a room. It’s run by a registered company, often across several sites, and the company’s trading name isn’t the hotel’s name.
- A campsite’s “unit” is a pitch. A pitch might host one person or ten, and there may be several fields on one site.
- A holiday let’s “unit” is the whole cottage. It might be run by an elderly couple with no trading name and no premises name. It’s just the cottage.
Our first design was a one-size-fits-all form. The legislation asks us to capture four things: type of accommodation, capacity, availability and unit names. It sounds easy but ask a campsite owner for their “unit name” and you’ll get a puzzled look. A seemingly simple question can be meaningless to the person who has to answer it.
Doing the hard work to make it simple
We decided it was our job to make the service make sense, rather than the user’s job to translate it. That meant three things:
- Speaking the user’s language. The service now shows the right term for the right person. Hotels are asked about rooms and self-catering owners about their lets.
- Allowing estimates. Campsites tell us how many pitches they have, and the service works out a rough capacity. Nobody has to guess how many people might squeeze into a field.
- Flexing on requirements. We don’t ask hotels to list every room, for example. This only happened because we made the case to our Policy colleagues.
When legislation meets real life
The questions after our talk were some of the best bits, and many were about this last point. How much room is there to interpret legislation flexibly when real-world situations don’t match what the drafters pictured?
Our answer was that flexibility doesn’t mean ignoring the legislation. It means asking what the policy is for, then designing the service to deliver that intent. We didn’t go to our Policy team with opinions. We went with evidence from user research showing exactly where the standard approach confused people and what that would do to the data. That’s what got the conversation moving.
It matters because a confusing service costs everyone. It leads to more errors, which means worse data (the whole point of the register) and potentially penalties for providers. It also means frustrated users, people giving up halfway, more calls to the helpdesk and a dent in our reputation. Getting it right means more people registering correctly, first time.
Three things to take away
- Deliver on policy intent and think about the impact an inflexible approach could have on users.
- Start by understanding who your users are and what they need, in policy as well as in services.
- Keep listening, including after launch. We’ll keep iterating as we learn more.
Thanks to Transform Wales and TransformGov Talks for bringing the event to Cardiff, and to everyone who came along and asked such thoughtful questions.
If you offer visitor accommodation in Wales, you can find out more and get ready to register on GOV.WALES.
Please note: everything we share is work in progress and may change as we continue to develop the service.
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