deborahamzil
Written 23 posts
Refreshing Scotland’s Digital Strategy, part 2
24th March 2025
Guest blog post by Colin Birchenall, Chief Technology Officer, the Digital Office for Scottish Local Government. At the heart of Scotland’s Digital Strategy is the recognition that digital is a fundamental enabler for achieving the country’s priorities. Whether it is economic growth, social inclusion, or environmental sustainability, digital solutions play a crucial role in driving…
We made a content design system in 4 weeks
18th March 2025
Guest blog post from Andy Robertson, Senior Content Designer, Social Security Scotland. We built a design system for our intranet. It creates a consistent user experience for our colleagues processing benefit applications. The design system is a library of reusable content and patterns. Here is an overview of our approach to plan, write and build…
ScotAccount recognised for having significant impact on public services
21st February 2025
Blog post by Scottish Government’s ScotAccount team. The ScotAccount team were delighted to join colleagues from Disclosure Scotland at the Holyrood Connect Digital Health and Care Awards in Edinburgh on 18th February 2025. The teams were thrilled to be short-listed for the Digital Service Transformation Award for their collaborative delivery of ‘PVG Online’. The Digital…
How designing for low English literacy empowers everyone
21st February 2025
Guest blog from Marta McCullough, Content Designer, Social Security Scotland. Imagine I’d named this blog ‘Jak projektowanie z myślą o osobach z niskim poziomem znajomości angielskiego wzmacnia pozycję wszystkich klientów’. Most of you, unless you speak Polish, would have thought ‘that page is not for me.’ If I’d written this blog in a language that’s…
Refreshing Scotland’s Digital Strategy: Process blog part 1 (of a few)
27th January 2025
Blog post by Becca Fairless, head of digital strategy and policy, Scottish Government. In 2021 we launched our Joint Digital Strategy for Scotland – A Changing Nation – how Scotland will thrive in a digital world. For the first time it brought together the work on digital transformation happening in local authorities with the work…
How text message notifications helped more than 2000 Social Security Scotland clients use unspent benefit payments
22nd January 2025
Guest blog post from Jake Keith, Content Designer, Social Security Scotland. A Social Security Scotland SMS (short Message Service) pilot led by the Product and Design team has helped hundreds of people access cash paid to them but left unspent. A total of 2,205 clients have spent money on their prepaid card since the start…
Designing with purpose and empathy
15th January 2025
Guest blog post from Emma Jones, Content Design Lead, Social Security Scotland. Good content design is about making the user experience simple. We need to design to help people do what they need to do, and no more. We need to focus on the purpose. Finding (and sticking to) the true purpose can be hard…
Beyond ‘what is’
8th January 2025
Guest blog post from Josie Vallely, Senior Service Designer, Social Security Scotland. What will our new service design team look like? Like the medieval bestiary artists who were asked to paint creatures they had never seen in real life, we don’t know exactly what it will be, so we have the freedom of imagination to…
Building confidence in content design
18th December 2024
Guest blog from Claire Robertson, Senior Content Designer, Social Security Scotland. Over the next few months, Social Security Scotland will be sharing a series of blogs from our User Centred Design team. We’ll give an insight into our ways of working and share some examples of our collaborative, user-centred approach. At Social Security Scotland, working…
A shared destiny for public sector data
18th October 2024
Blog post by Shona Nicol, Head of Technical Data Policy, Data Division, Digital Directorate. As a data professional, it can sometime feel hard to get others interested in data. Perhaps like many in this profession, I can often express the importance and value of data for good in an overly technical way. However when our…