Content design Archives | Scottish Enterprise Design blog

Why people use subtitles and captioning

David O'Brien — Thu, 18 Jun 2026 20:08:13 +0000

I’ve been attending a series of events for Digital Accessibility Week 2026, a cross-government online event taking place from Monday 18 May ending on Thursday 21 May which is Global Accessibility Awareness Day (GAAD). One of the events was Designing with autistic people – Inclusive design that benefits everyone, organised by HMRC’s digital accessibility team. Delivered by …

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On colours

David O'Brien — Wed, 13 Mar 2024 21:15:22 +0000

Some readers may have noticed that Scottish Enterprise launched a new brand identity recently. Our logo was updated, and our typefaces and colour palettes changed. I’m not a marketer, so that’s not my domain and I have nothing to say about that. But I am a designer. And, when you’re designing communications material, whether it’s …

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Card sorting to improve information architecture

Katie Chambers — Mon, 15 Jan 2024 15:32:40 +0000

Ahead of our migration of the Scottish Enterprise website to our new design system, the User Experience (UX) team wanted to make some improvements to the information architecture of the site. First of all, what do we mean by information architecture? Information architecture, or IA, can mean different things to different people. To some it’s …

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Providing text alternatives for non-text content

David O'Brien — Fri, 24 Mar 2023 22:37:00 +0000

I recently ran a session with some of our content developers covering alternative text, and the difference between alt text and captions. It seemed to be well received, so I thought I’d write it up. “Text alternatives” is the first guideline of the first principle of WCAG 2.1. It’s literally the first thing to think …

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The exporting experience: one year on

David O'Brien — Thu, 23 Dec 2021 15:56:05 +0000

At the end of March this year, my colleague Katie wrote a post about some work she had been involved with to improve the exporting user journey on scottish-enterprise.com. She included some analytics data that seemed to indicate some significant improvements. But she only had 3 months’ worth of data, which makes it hard to …

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Writing for people, not businesses

Katie Chambers — Mon, 11 Oct 2021 10:02:21 +0000

As an enterprise agency, our role is to support economic development, and this includes offering support and information to businesses in Scotland. This sometimes results in the misconception that our users are simply ‘businesses’. But that’s not strictly the case. Even though our services are aimed at businesses, it’s still individual people that read our …

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What businesses think about Fair Work and Net Zero

Katie Dickerson — Thu, 20 May 2021 10:04:46 +0000

The way that we support businesses is changing. As part of these changes, we’re putting a bigger emphasis on ensuring that the companies that we support meet, or are working towards, Fair Work and Net Zero principles. What are Fair Work and Net Zero? Fair Work Fair work is work that offers all individuals an effective …

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Why you shouldn’t make assumptions about content

Katie Dickerson — Mon, 17 Aug 2020 10:41:16 +0000

We recently launched the new GlobalScot website, and I was scrolling through it when I noticed something odd. On some of the case studies and articles, the formatting was off. There were no spaces between paragraphs or styling on the sub-headers. I had a chat with my content design colleague and one of our developers. …

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Designing for mobile first

David O'Brien — Tue, 22 Sep 2015 20:17:54 +0000

We recently released a Beta version of our export health check diagnostic. It’s a simple thing that asks you 7 questions with yes or no answers. You can run through it in 2 minutes. We know this, because we tested it through a rapid series of iterations. We made a prototype, put it out for …

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It’s your first date. Behave …

David O'Brien — Wed, 24 Jun 2015 23:15:00 +0000

We’ve been experimenting with mood maps to record customers’ emotions while they use the prototypes we test with them. The results are revealing … Mood maps are pretty simple graphs of emotion over time. You just observe someone interacting with the app or content you are developing and plot how positive or negative their emotions …

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Rethinking content creation

Jenny Honey — Fri, 05 Dec 2014 11:07:56 +0000

One of our challenges, in the Digital Content & Channels team, is how we can plan and resource the creation of content on our websites and digital channels more effectively. And we’ve tried a number of different methods, but we haven’t solved the main issue for the content team, which is that of workload and …

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Faking it

David O'Brien — Fri, 28 Nov 2014 22:31:24 +0000

This week, I did something I thought I’d never do: I deceived our users. Our visitors. Our customers. That’s pretty much a sacking offence, so maybe I should explain. As part of the digital first team, we’re looking for ways to get user feedback. After all, how will we know if customers think our products …

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Our first live event: the facts and figures

David O'Brien — Thu, 24 Jul 2014 15:23:35 +0000

On 22 and 23 July, we set up a live stream from the Commonwealth Games Business Conference. As well as the YouTube video stream, we used every channel at our disposal – twitter, LikedIn, Google+, our websites – to stimulate the debate. It was a huge effort for a small team. Three of us – …

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The Knowledge Library

Rob Catterson — Sat, 28 Jun 2014 16:37:42 +0000

Something struck me on the flight to Belgium this week about the Knowledge Hub we have created on our sites. It’s not a hub (a rubbish word), it’s a library. The Knowledge Hub should be a place where customers constantly surface useful, relevant content. Scott Monty’s article illustrates what we have in common with the New …

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Design content first … who would have thought of that?

David O'Brien — Fri, 27 Jun 2014 22:17:55 +0000

In November 2007, when I was part of what was then the SE web team, we were asked if we could take on a project. The objective was to completely re-design and rewrite the SE website. Some of you may remember what it looked like back then. Including an incredible floating woman. Stock photography. It’s why …

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