Digital

  • Next steps for Scotland’s Official Statistics Open Data platform

    14th July 2022 by

    Blog by Victoria Avila and Martin Macfie, Data Division, Digital Directorate In the Open Data team within Scottish Government, part of our role is to manage the publication of open datasets on statistics.gov.scot. This is the open data publishing platform for Official Statistics in Scotland. The platform contains around 300 datasets and reference datasets published…

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  • Going live with our first customer using the Cloud Migration Service

    2nd February 2022 by

    Blog by Serena Nusing, Dragos Leonte, and Ross Clements, Cloud and Digital Services Division, Digital Directorate. A little over a year ago we kicked off our first pilot and started our journey to develop a new service for the Scottish Government (SG) and the wider public sector to migrate their applications, data, and workloads to…

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  • Making the most of user research findings

    14th July 2021 by

    Blog post co-written by Mark Daniels, Aleksandra Kaleta-Pyrek, Daniel Migliorelli and Fiona Wragg In this blog post, Mark Daniels,  Daniel Migliorelli and Fiona Wragg who work in the Digital Transformation Division of the Scottish Government’s Digital Directorate and Aleksandra Kaleta-Pyrek who works in Social Security Directorate share discovery findings showing that standardised processes for sharing…

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  • Designing for everyone: user research in the Cloud First Programme

    8th March 2021 by

    Blog by Marta Kuczkowska, User Researcher, Cloud First Programme. This programme aims to help organisations in the public sector to use and benefit from cloud technology in their services. Designing for two audiences In user research we work with people to understand their different goals, needs or reasons for using public services. Each user also…

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  • Scottish Approach to Service Design: Creating Conditions for Change

    3rd July 2019 by

    This blog is by Dr Dhruv Sharma, User Reaserch Lead at the Scottish Government. Amongst all the exciting stuff I do within Scottish Government’s Office of the Chief Designer, one crucial part of my job is replying to the question, “so, what does Scottish Approach to Service Design actually mean?”   Thankfully we now have…

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  • Making events more accessible: return of the inclusion form

    21st February 2019 by

    Dr Philip J Kirk, Senior User Researcher in the Digital Directorate shares an update on the work the Office of the Chief Designer is doing to help make events more accessible. As an organisation providing services for citizens, we’re responsible for making sure research and design activities are inclusive and accessible. This includes making sure…

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  • The Service Design Champions Programme: what we thought

    3rd July 2017 by

    The Service Design Champions event was a 4-day introduction to service and user-focused thinking, run by the User Research and Service Design team. Mark Black-Daniels and Dawn Kofie, content designers from mygov.scot, reflect on their experiences of the programme. Why we wanted to do the training MBD: In the work I’ve been doing for the…

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  • Designing a good survey

    17th February 2017 by

    This is a blog post by Philip Kirk, one of our user researchers.   A survey can be an effective way to get information on who is using your service. They can investigate the characteristics, behaviours and opinions of a group of people and, if designed well, can help you understand your users and what…

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  • Pop-up Study – Taking research to where our users are

    26th January 2017 by

    This is a blog post by Sam Tilston, one of our user researchers. Pop-ups are a quick and direct user research method. They allow us to take our questions to a wider range of potential users, taking us to where they are, rather than bringing them to the lab. It’s less formal than traditional usability…

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  • An update on our accessibility testing

    3rd December 2015 by

    This is a post by Sam Tilston, one of our user researchers, and Scott Langley, one of our user experience designers. As part of our on-going accessibility work on www.mygov.scot, we recently carried out a round of accessibility testing. It’s an important part of our overall accessibility strategy to carry out testing with real users as they…

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