Jono Ellis

Written 52 posts

Performance Manager for the MyGov programme.

Five principles for generating usable user research

9th September 2014

This is a post by Cat Macaulay, our User Research Lead and is part of our series on Standards & Guidelines Building a user research practice into a large and complex project like mygov.scot is a pretty daunting task. So as we start out on this journey, we wanted to try and give ourselves some…

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Dipping into design – composition fundamentals

8th September 2014

Design elements describe basic ideas around the practice of good visual design. These elements include colour, shape, texture and space. I’m going to dip into an aspect of this, exploring some fundamentals of composition, as this helps set the scene for the work we will be doing / have done so far. We started with composition and typography – our fundamentals…

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Security within agile environments

5th September 2014

This is a post by Neil Campbell, our Information Security Officer and is part of our series on Standards & Guidelines Security within agile environments can be challenging. There’s a need to juggle a large number of competing factors including velocity, compliance requirements, ambitions around user experience and adherence to standards – all while maintaining…

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From a to b (alpha to beta)

5th September 2014

This is a post by Peter Smith, Product Owner for Alpha and Beta Alpha is now live and in use. So far we’ve had over 44,000 page views and 1,800 users visit the site. We anticipate this to increase when we make a more formal public release from November.  

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Architectural concepts: a quality attributes overview

29th August 2014

This is a post by Graham Beedie, our Technical Architect and is part of our series on Standards & Guidelines We know designing and building high quality software is tough. The ability to define and measure the quality of delivered software is a desired, but all too often unmet ambition. In order to fully explain what we mean…

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Consistent content style, saying goodbye to jargon

27th August 2014

This is a post by Rachel Caldwell, our Content Designer (NHS 24) and is part of our series on Standards & Guidelines Have you ever gone to a website looking for answers, started reading what’s there, and quickly felt like you need a translator to make sense of all the jargon? It’s a common complaint….

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Defining our work for standards and guidelines, an introduction

11th August 2014

This is post by Calum Shepherd, our Head of Digital Strategy and is part of our series on Standards & Guidelines The term standard  can mean different things when used by different people, so it’s important we are clear about our usage with you. We have opted not to use standards as a single way of describing material created…

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Alpha now available to Scottish Government staff

7th August 2014

This is a post by Tom Meade, our Programme Manager We’ve been working on an alpha release for the past 10 weeks, learning a lot along the way. So what is the alpha? Alpha is our way of trying to see if we’re doing the right thing for our users. It’s our ambition that overtime,…

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User testing in alpha

2nd July 2014

This is a post by Paul Wheatley, our Senior UX Designer With mygov.scot we have taken a user-centred approach to design. Practically, this involves a number of methods, but the most important is that we conduct regular testing with real users at least once every fortnight on an on-going basis.

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Our early thoughts on URLs

25th June 2014

This a post by Calum Shepherd, our Head of Digital Strategy. In the simplest terms a URL is the location of a web page that you visit in your web browser. Handily, if you ever need to visit that web page again in the future, you can use its URL to go directly to it. You may…

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