deborahamzil
Written 17 posts
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…
Are you a transformational leader passionate about data in Scotland?
24th April 2024
Blog by Tom Wilkinson, Chief Data Officer, Scottish Government Public sector data is a vital component in making sure that services for the people of Scotland are delivered efficiently and effectively. In an increasingly complex world, data plays an ever-expanding role in shaping and supporting economic, societal and environmental transformations. To support the public…
Basic Law-Making For Legislative Computer Systems: interim findings workshops
11th January 2024
Blog by Scottish Government, Research Fellow Gordon Guthrie. Gordon is a Research Fellow at the Scottish Government under the First Minister’s Digital Fellowship Programme. All opinions in this blog are his own and they do not represent Scottish Government policy. I have been doing a research project called BIus – Basic Lawmaking for Digital Systems…
Foundations first – realising the potential of open data
27th September 2023
A blog by Louise Meikleham, Senior Data Policy Officer in Digital Directorate’s Data Division, explores data’s role in Scotland’s Open Government Action Plan. Data is all around us. From fitness to finance, holidays to health, it’s everywhere. As individuals we use it all the time to make decisions. But we’re not just consumers, we produce…
Next steps for Scotland’s Official Statistics Open Data platform
14th July 2022
Blog by Victoria Avila and Martin Macfie, Data Division, Digital Directorate In the Open Data team within Scottish Government, part of our role is to manage the publication of open datasets on statistics.gov.scot. This is the open data publishing platform for Official Statistics in Scotland. The platform contains around 300 datasets and reference datasets published…
Data and Intelligence Network sets out future plans
1st June 2022
Blog by Lewis McCathie, Communications and Engagement Manager, Data & Intelligence Network. Created by the Scottish Government in 2020 to provide evidence-based analysis in response to the Covid-19 pandemic, Data & Intelligence Network (DIN) is now looking to build upon this by supporting a number of Scottish Government policy areas so to utilise public sector…
The Truth of Designing Services
12th November 2021
In this blog Sam Ernstzen, Digital Service Standard Assessor within Scottish Government’s Directorate for Internal Audit and Assurance, and Serena Nusing, Senior Service Designer, based within Scottish Government’s Digital Directorate share with you five truths about designing services. Being experienced service designers we see very common things across projects. We thought sharing what we see…