Digital

  • Creating the service patterns cards

    22nd December 2025 by

    Blog post by Kirsty Sinclair, User-Centred Design, Lead Service Designer, and Anusree Raju, Senior Interaction Designer. This is blog post three of three. Read the previous blogs in the series. Service pattern design work is supporting the adoption of common digital solutions and promoting reuse across services, aligning with the refreshed Digital Strategy for Scotland...

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  • Practical application of reusable service patterns on a real service use case 

    19th December 2025 by

    Blog post by Kirsty Sinclair, User-Centred Design, Lead Service Designer, and Anusree Raju, Senior Interaction Designer. This is blog two of a three blog series. Read blog post one. Service pattern design work is supporting the adoption of common digital solutions and promoting reuse across services, aligning with the refreshed Digital Strategy for Scotland vision...

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  • Reusable service patterns in Scottish public sector services

    18th December 2025 by

    Blog post by Kirsty Sinclair, User-Centred Design, Lead Service Designer, and Anusree Raju, Senior Interaction Designer. Service pattern design work is supporting the adoption of common digital solutions and promoting reuse across services, aligning with the refreshed Digital Strategy for Scotland vision statement: Sustainable Digital Public Services. Reusable service patterns is a term for design...

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  • Designing complex content in the age of Artificial Intelligence (AI)

    10th October 2025 by

    Guest blog post by Therese Hooper, Lead Content Designer in Social Security Scotland. This blog is about the tools I used to tackle a complicated content challenge, working in a new cross-functional team facing major time constraints. The role of content design You will have heard this before. A content designer’s role is not just...

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  • Understanding how we can serve people with additional communication needs

    11th June 2025 by

    Guest blog from Fiona Wright, Senior User Researcher at Social Security Scotland. Making our communications more accessible is a key focus for the user-centred design team at Social Security Scotland. From years of research and design work, we understood that some clients with additional communication needs were facing barriers to accessing our service. To understand...

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  • Paving the way to omnichannel

    2nd April 2025 by

    Guest blog from Emma Jones, Lead Content Designer at Social Security Scotland. An accessible, inclusive way to communicate At Social Security Scotland, we are at the start of a journey to move from ‘letters as default’ to a more inclusive, accessible approach. An approach where the method of communication meets the needs of the client....

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  • Journey mapping as a content design tool

    28th March 2025 by

    Guest blog from Claire Robertson, Senior Content Designer at Social Security Scotland. “Journey mapping is completely fundamental to content design” (Sarah Winters and Rachel Edwards, Content Design, second edition) As content designers everything we do is based on user needs. User needs are the bread and butter of any user centred design (UCD) team. Every...

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  • Iteration and continuous improvement – a Blockbuster story?

    12th February 2025 by

    Guest blog from Jayne Purcell, Service Design Lead, Social Security Scotland. Iteration and continuous improvement are words I hear a lot. What I have observed over the years is that iteration and continuous improvement usually means iterating and improving the current design, with not enough effort put into exploring the future and the vision to...

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  • How text message notifications helped more than 2000 Social Security Scotland clients use unspent benefit payments

    22nd January 2025 by

    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

    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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