Digital

  • Designing with purpose and empathy

    15th January 2025 by

    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

    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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  • ScotPayments Design in Action (Part 2: Inclusive Payments) 

    7th January 2025 by

    Blog by Ryan Bowler and Fiona MacLellan to highlight ScotPayments UCD team deep dive into Inclusive Payments and why payment choice matters.    Inclusive Payments  We shared a post previously which introduces our User-Centred Design team and our iterative design process. Here we are with part 2 in our Design in Action series, with more on...

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  • ScotPayments Design in Action (Part 1: Introduction) 

    15th May 2024 by

    Blog by Fiona MacLellan and Cal Marr to celebrate ScotPayments milestones including £40 million with our Design in Action blog post series.  Our team have a few milestones to celebrate this week! On 15 May 2024  ScotPayments service processed our 100th payment run, which means we’ve sent over £40million across 20,000 payments since we launched...

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  • Basic Law-Making For Legislative Computer Systems: interim findings workshops

    11th January 2024 by

    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...

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  • Basic Law-Making For Legislative Computer Systems – Part 5

    2nd October 2023 by

    So we have systematically rethought how we build state computer systems – but it is important to remember that the context that leads to them includes important actors who are not in the government world. The voters want things, their desires are mediated by the press and think tanks and political parties – things happen in context.

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  • Basic Law-Making For Legislative Computer Systems – Part 4

    25th September 2023 by

    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. This is the fourth of five articles outlining the research of the Blus project – Basic...

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  • Unlocking the Value of Data Programme report published

    12th September 2023 by

    The Scottish Government commissioned this multi-disciplinary group to explore the issue of private sector use of public sector personal data in Scotland, as public sector data controllers had identified the need for clearer guidance in this area. The report proposes high-level principles and a series of recommendations to guide ethical access to public sector personal data in Scotland.

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  • Basic Law-Making For Legislative Computer Systems – Part 3

    11th September 2023 by

    If we are to make the production of digital systems explicit we need to every participant to be able to understand their role – and critically that means making the technical decisions visible and comprehensible.

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  • Basic Law-Making For Legislative Computer Systems – Part 2

    4th September 2023 by

    This is the second of five articles outlining the research of the BIus project – Basic Law-Making For Legislative Computer Systems. Read the first here – it outlines the problems of connecting slow legislative iteration to fast digital development processes.

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