Digital

  • ScotAccount recognised for having significant impact on public services

    21st February 2025 by

    Blog post by Scottish Government’s ScotAccount team. The ScotAccount team were delighted to join colleagues from Disclosure Scotland at the Holyrood Connect Digital Health and Care Awards in Edinburgh on 18th February 2025. The teams were thrilled to be short-listed for the Digital Service Transformation Award for their collaborative delivery of ‘PVG Online’.  The Digital…

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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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  • 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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  • 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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  • 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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  • 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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  • 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 – Confirmation of Payee has launched

    28th March 2024 by

    Blog by Megan Abbott, Lead Business Relationship Manager, ScotPayments. In our last blog, we shared a progress update for ScotPayments, a new payments service being designed and built by the Digital Directorate. Since then, we have gone live with our new feature Confirmation of Payee. Confirmation of Payee helps users verify that they are sending…

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