Digital

  • Writing for wellbeing: why we created a trauma and stress writing guide

    18th June 2025 by

    Guest blog from Sarah Waterfield, Senior Content Designer at Social Security Scotland. At Social Security Scotland, we know that language matters. The words we use in our communications and webpages shape how people experience our service. Many of our clients have faced difficult life events or negative experiences with benefits. If our language is complex…

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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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  • 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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  • 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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  • Building confidence in content design

    18th December 2024 by

    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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  • 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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  • Introducing Interaction Design Week 2022

    12th October 2022 by

    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

    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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