Digital

  • Scottish Government Data Maturity Programme – Information session

    7th May 2025 by

    Blog by Sally Kerr, Data Transformation Lead, Technical Data Policy team. With the rapid adoption of Artificial Intelligence (AI), data maturity has become even more important, and becoming data-ready for AI is one of the key drivers for those organisations who choose to take part in the Scottish Government Data Maturity Programme. To become data-ready…

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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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  • Refreshing Scotland’s Digital Strategy, part 2

    24th March 2025 by

    Guest blog post by Colin Birchenall, Chief Technology Officer, the Digital Office for Scottish Local Government. At the heart of Scotland’s Digital Strategy is the recognition that digital is a fundamental enabler for achieving the country’s priorities. Whether it is economic growth, social inclusion, or environmental sustainability, digital solutions play a crucial role in driving…

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  • 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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  • 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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