StatsWales: Developing a public data sharing service
WELSH GOVERNMENT
StatsWales is a Welsh Government service that centralises public sector data from public bodies in Wales. It covers a wide range of topics, from Housing to Health to the Environment.
The Welsh Government wanted to update the current StatsWales platform, which was over a decade old. They wanted to design a new service with better data sharing, availability and reliability that would also incorporate modern user centred design principles and UX patterns.
Register Dynamics specialises in coming up with strategic solutions to complex jobs like this. We apply our technical expertise through a highly context-specific, user-centred lens.
The challenge
StatsWales needed to ingest data from many diverse sources, then disseminate it to a wide variety of users, from public sector organisations to researchers and journalists.
It would be essential to develop a robust data ingestion process that could effectively upload and clean datasets from different organisations in inconsistent formats.
The inability to identify common groupings across a range of reference datasets (like those from Local Authorities) was cited as a particular pain point by existing users. Ensuring commonality of fields between different data sets was crucial.
What we did
Working with our business partners, our first step was to learn about the existing service and user landscape. We did extensive research to understand the existing data structures and how they met (or didn’t meet) existing user needs. These needs were highly varied and numerous: Some users needed headline figures or summaries of information, while others needed to be able to explore datasets and find associations within and between them. Users also showed varying levels of data literacy.
Operational and business constraints restricted our ability to access the backend of the existing service, so we wrote a web crawler to download and archive the data. This helped us better understand what we were working with and how it could be migrated to the new service. Our analysis of this data gave shape to the real requirements of the service, uncovering assumptions and approaches that differed between groups of users. Meanwhile, accessing data through the front end helped us gain an excellent view of the current user experience, including common patterns of use.
Understanding the needs and behaviours of the users of the existing service helped us form a more tailored data strategy, including a useful blueprint for data migration.
We also deeply investigated the geographical and administrative divisions used by the various data sets (for example, categories related to local authorities and other administrative entities). Using what we learned, we developed a set of reference data that could be used to maintain consistency across datasets. (You can read more about this examination of reference data.)
The result
We managed the archiving and migration of all the existing data, and developed a robust set of reference data that could be iterated.
Building on our work, the Welsh government continued to develop its update of StatsWales and ultimately launched the new service in September 2025.
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