I joined the Scottish Government's digital team as employee #2, working at a time when the organisation was establishing new ways of designing and delivering digital public services.
My work covered design, research and the foundations needed for teams to work consistently across government services.
The challenge wasn't just designing individual services. The programme needed a stronger user-centred design and research practice, alongside shared foundations that teams could use across government services.
I helped establish the design and research practice, working with designers, researchers, product and engineering teams across the programme.
I built the Scottish Government Design System to give teams shared patterns and reusable foundations rather than solving the same interface problems repeatedly.
The system provided a common foundation for teams designing digital public services. designsystem.gov.scot ↗
User research needed to be something the team could run regularly, within the practical constraints of a government environment.
I set up a simple, portable usability lab using readily available equipment. The setup connected a participant room and observation room, with the participant's screen and camera feed available to observers.
The environment had to work around real constraints. More advanced Apple TV and Wi-Fi setups proved unreliable on the development network, so we settled on a simple wired solution with HDMI and USB running between the rooms.
As part of the team's practice of documenting and sharing our work, I wrote about the setup for the Scottish Government Digital blog.
Setting up a cost effective user research lab ↗
The article documents the equipment, technical setup and constraints behind the lab.
The work sat within a broader programme to make Scottish public services easier to access and operate online.
mygov.scot was moving from its alpha into beta, with the team working toward a live operating model and building the foundations needed to publish public-sector content at scale. User research had become embedded in the product-design programme, alongside processes for discovering and validating user needs and a publishing platform connecting those needs to published content.
The contemporary beta announcement describes the work as more than simply building a website. The team was developing the processes, publishing infrastructure and technical architecture needed to operate the service at scale.
The work also sat alongside services such as myaccount, designed to give people across Scotland a secure way to access multiple public services online with one account. The service was intended to work across local authorities, NHS services and other public-sector organisations.
The most important part of the work wasn't a single screen.
It was helping establish the foundations around digital public services: a design system, a practical research capability and a more user-centred way of working across the programme.
More than a decade later, mygov.scot is still the Scottish Government's main channel for information about and access to public services, with the service continuing to evolve. In 2026, the team is still actively developing the platform and its digital services. mygov.scot ↗
