Digital

  • How designing for low English literacy empowers everyone

    21st February 2025 by

    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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  • 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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  • The Social Security Programme – approach to integrated assurance

    5th February 2025 by

    Guest blog from Lois MacFadyen, Head of the Digital Assurance Office. The Social Security Programme was set up to build and implement the new Social Security System in Scotland, making arrangements for the delivery of 17 benefits.  The design and development work on the first end to end service started in October 2017 and the...

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  • Planning – insights from the Technology Assurance Framework

    29th January 2025 by

    Guest blog by Laura Johnstone, Continuous Improvement team, Digital Assurance Office. Planning is one of the Scottish Government’s programme and project management principles and is described as ‘considering all aspects of our projects and continuously planning, managing dependencies, agreeing and refining evidence based assumptions, and reporting on progress against milestones throughout.’  Planning has been identified...

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  • Refreshing Scotland’s Digital Strategy: Process blog part 1 (of a few)

    27th January 2025 by

    Blog post by Becca Fairless, head of digital strategy and policy, Scottish Government.  In 2021 we launched our Joint Digital Strategy for Scotland –  A Changing Nation – how Scotland will thrive in a digital world. For the first time it brought together the work on digital transformation happening in local authorities with the work...

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  • Statistics.gov.scot Improvement Project – Discovery

    23rd January 2025 by

    Blog by Auren Clarke, Senior Product Manager in the Digital Directorate’s Open Data Team, Data Division. I work in the Scottish Government’s Open Data team, and we are responsible for maintaining Scotland’s Official Statistics platform statistics.gov.scot. Last year, we gave an update on the work of the open data team – we are focused on...

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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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  • Unlocking the Value of Scotland’s Data – Response to report published.

    16th January 2025 by

    Blog by Chris Bergin, Strategic Data Policy Adviser, Digital Citizen Unit. The Scottish Government has published its response to the report by the Independent Expert Group for the Unlocking the Value of Data programme. The programme is exploring how the public sector can responsibly unlock the value of the personal datasets they hold – securely,...

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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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  • ScotPayments – Building our own in-house technical capabilities

    9th January 2025 by

    Blog by Megan Abbott, Lead Business Relationship Manager in ScotPayments, sharing an update on progress and how the team have been working on their own internal transformation by building in-house technical capabilities. Here at ScotPayments we focus a lot on how we are supporting the digital transformation of public services in Scotland. By thinking about...

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