Digital

Understanding how we can serve people with additional communication needs

June 11, 2025 by Stewart Hamilton No Comments | Category Digital Scotland, Social Security Scotland, User-centred design

Guest blog from Fiona Wright, Senior User Researcher at Social Security Scotland.

Making our communications more accessible is a key focus for the user-centred design team at Social Security Scotland. From years of research and design work, we understood that some clients with additional communication needs were facing barriers to accessing our service. To understand the needs of this audience more fully, Jennifer Wartnaby and I conducted a large scale research project that included participants with physical and mental health conditions, neurodiverse people and people with learning disabilities, visually impaired people and people with hearing loss. Most participants had more than one condition impacting their communication, highlighting the complexity of needs we need to take into account when we design communications. We learned a lot about improving communications for this user group, but also about making research accessible and inclusive for people with additional communication needs – this post details some of our learnings on both.

Being clear about our service

In the background of this research, we have been working with colleagues at Social Security Scotland to think about the communication formats we currently offer as alternatives to standard letters – Large Print, Audio, Braille and Easy Read. We already knew that people are sometimes receiving formats that do not meet their needs, and as an organisation we have an objective of reducing costs in our communications with clients. The research generated useful insights around each of these formats, but also some broader findings about how we ask clients about what they need, and the ways they can tell us about their needs and preferences.

We learned that we need to tell people more about the alternative format options we offer. For example, Audio is an option that is poorly understood – will you receive an email with an mp3 file as an attachment if you select Audio? Or a CD? Some people thought it might mean a phone conversation or a voice note. Making clear what each alternative format means and how it will be provided is important for users in order for them to make an informed choice.

Knowing that this was an issue for Easy Read in particular, we showed people the alternative format choices with some added descriptive text. Participants mostly reacted positively to this change. However, we also heard about the importance of terminology used in those descriptions. The text we showed participants stated that Easy Read ‘helps people with learning disabilities understand information easily’. Participants in our research who use Easy Read, but who do not consider themselves to have a learning disability, were sometimes upset by this language. In particular, neurodiverse people emphasised the importance of not using labelling language. As these users highlighted, we can describe an alternative format option without assuming or saying anything about the people who might need it.

Delivering genuine choice

The research showed that for some people, it will always be more complex than ticking the right box on our forms. For people with multiple and complex communication needs, there is sometimes a need for more bespoke interaction. For example, two people who took part in this research are non-verbal and communicate through pre-programmed devices. For those people, a combination of Easy Read, digital, and face-to-face communication is needed for them to be able to be actively involved in managing their benefits. As an organisation, we need ways of recording those needs and then providing a service which meets them. Understanding the circumstances and needs of this small minority of clients can help us improve how we ask about, record, and respect their communication needs.

Choice and flexibility were unsurprising themes in the research – which helps to support the work we are doing towards delivering a omnichannel service. What also came up was that genuine choice needs to include opt out options of certain communication channels, while maintaining equality of access for those clients. For many people, phoning us is a default when they have a query or need to resolve a problem. While this is frustrating for many, for others it creates a critical barrier to accessing our service. In this research we heard from people who need to be supported through non-digital channels, for example in person support from an adviser. Equally, for some people, expanding digital, self-serve options will enable them to communicate with us in ways that work for them.

Accessible and inclusive research

All of these learnings can also help us improve how we conduct our research. We knew this project would be complex and require us to make changes to our research processes, and to learn from organisations supporting people with additional communication needs. But as with any design, we did not get it all right first time, and in future we would make some changes.

In particular, the need to communicate more with each participant, or their representative, before each session, to understand their communication style and needs as fully as possible. Doing this would have helped us prepare better for some of the more challenging sessions, and to make participants more comfortable from the outset, rather than finding ways to do this as we built rapport in sessions.

From a planning perspective, this work emphasised the need to stay attentive to our own resources and needs while doing research. We were delighted to get a high response rate during recruitment, but that meant we slightly overstretched ourselves, conducting many sessions every week for a four week period. Facilitating research sessions with people who have negative past experiences of services and inaccessible communications requires a lot of care and time for reflective practice.

We needed more time for breaks and debriefs, both essential to doing research that keeps everyone involved safe and supported.

Getting client communications right

As an organisation, we are trialling changes to how we communicate with our clients, with user research aiming to understand how these changes are meeting user needs and what we need to work towards in the future. Our work to understand users with additional communication needs is one strand of ensuring that as we do so we design with accessibility and equality in mind.

Has your team done work on accessible communications you would like to share? Email us at: usercentreddesign@socialsecurity.gov.scot to get in touch.

Tags: accessible, communications, Social Security Scotland, User-centred design (UCD)

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