Digital

  • 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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  • We made a content design system in 4 weeks

    18th March 2025 by

    Guest blog post from Andy Robertson, Senior Content Designer, Social Security Scotland. We built a design system for our intranet. It creates a consistent user experience for our colleagues processing benefit applications. The design system is a library of reusable content and patterns. Here is an overview of our approach to plan, write and build…

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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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  • 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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  • Service design and COTS products

    24th February 2022 by

    Blog by Serena Nusing, Senior Service Designer, Digital Directorate. Often, when organisations start a new IT project or require new software, there is a question about whether to build the solution themselves or to buy it. When it comes to the buying option, organisations are then often presented with a Commercial Off-the-Shelf (COTS) product that…

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  • The Truth of Designing Services

    12th November 2021 by

    In this blog Sam Ernstzen, Digital Service Standard Assessor within Scottish Government’s Directorate for Internal Audit and Assurance, and Serena Nusing, Senior Service Designer, based within Scottish Government’s Digital Directorate share with you five truths about designing services.  Being experienced service designers we see very common things across projects. We thought sharing what we see…

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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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