Digital
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How designing for low English literacy empowers everyone
21st February 2025 by deborahamzil
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...
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How text message notifications helped more than 2000 Social Security Scotland clients use unspent benefit payments
22nd January 2025 by deborahamzil
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...
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Designing with purpose and empathy
15th January 2025 by deborahamzil
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...
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Beyond ‘what is’
8th January 2025 by deborahamzil
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...
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Building confidence in content design
18th December 2024 by deborahamzil
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...
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Introducing Interaction Design Week 2022
12th October 2022 by Stewart Hamilton
Inspired by the annual World IxDD event and based on the success of our first event 'World Interaction design day 2021’, the Interaction Design community in Scottish Government (SG) is bringing together an internal event for the second time called ‘Interaction Design Week 2022’ during the first week of November.
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Scottish Government celebrates World Interaction Design Day (IxDD 2021)
17th September 2021 by deborahamzil
For the first time The Scottish Government will be hosting a series of presentations and talks from 28th to 30th September to celebrate this year’s World Interaction Design Day for internal staff. What is IxDD 2021? IxDD 2021 is an annual event where Interaction Designers and User Centred Design practitioners come together as a united global...
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Digital Scotland Design System
25th August 2020 by Stewart Hamilton
Today marks the launch of the Digital Scotland Design System. This post explains what a design system is, who it’s aimed at, and how you can get involved. Firstly, what’s a design system? A design system is a collection of reusable components (in code) that can be put together to quickly and easily build your...
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5 things I learned from my first content crit
4th December 2019 by admin
Just days into my role as a new content designer I faced a baptism of fire – my first content crit. This meant the whole content design team – 10 of us – gathered to give frank feedback on my first content piece. No pressure! I rise from the flames to share what I learned:...
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Reflections on content design, Agile and Waterscrumban
3rd December 2019 by dawnkofie
I recently spent a year on secondment to Scottish Parliament working, as part of its web and online project, on content for its new website. I’m glad I did it and if you’re thinking about a secondment, go for it. As well as learning more about how the Parliament works, my...