Jane Reid

Jane’s been the lead user researcher at Disclosure Scotland, a Scottish Government agency, since March 2017.

Pioneering user research in Disclosure Scotland, she’s embedded the discipline in the organisation with their commitment to permanent UR staff working in an agile, multi-disciplinary team.

Before this, Jane spent 4 years as a user researcher at DWP working in the Universal Credit digital team in London. She then took up a secondment as Design Research Manager at Scottish Enterprise. However, she believes she’s been doing user research, and working with others to design better services, for over 20 years – before job titles, technology and management buy-in were mature enough to be able to make a real difference.

Her expertise lies in researching the needs of users with multiple problems in their lives, such as homelessness, drugs, alcohol, bereavement, caring issues, inter-generational unemployment and domestic abuse. As a great believer in not just sharing insights with people but really working together to solve problems that cut across other services, Jane’s an expert in bringing agencies together to collaborate and improve local services. This facility led to her appointment as the chair of a Glasgow based multi-agency domestic abuse forum. She’s also just set up a cross-government working group on asking questions about sex and/or gender, aiming to provide a consistency of approach across government services in the UK.

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