Senior Service Designer

In this role, your work may involve:
• Leading, designing and delivering significant assets, developing design concepts.

• Making important decisions based on research and understanding how this research impacts others.

• Identifying opportunities and gaps for end-users and the organisation across different touchpoints to help users complete tasks without friction.

• Contributing to a vibrant, diverse and passionate service design community and UCD family and helping to mature the professional capability, standards and service design.

• Understanding the needs and behaviour of users and knowing how to use this insight to underpin and drive the work that we do.

• Analysing failure within a service and identifying root causes for that failure.

• Negotiating policy and legislative change to support new services.

• Map/prototype end-to-end services and understand how they fit into wider societal, service, system and organisational contexts

• Coach, mentor and train other designers, helping set and communicate good practice to improve quality and consistency across DfE’s transformation programmes

• Help people and teams overcome complexity, designing, running and synthesising workshops to create clarity, alignment and direction.

Essential experience for this role:

1. Experience of designing and leading creative sessions
• You’re confident using facilitation and co-design approaches and service design methodologies to bring users, stakeholders, and individuals together to frame problems, agree on shared purpose and shape a design process to deliver desired service outcomes.

2. Experience of context-based design
• You know how to design systems for use across multiple services and can identify the simplest approach out of a variety of approaches.

• You can quickly gather data and support the team to prioritise insights from both primary and secondary research. Working closely with user researchers to define and communicate business/user needs

3. Experience of being a user-centred practitioner
• You know how to give direction on which tools or methods to use.

• You are experienced in meeting users’ needs across a variety of channels.

• You’ll have significant experience collaborating with teams and stakeholders to help define the problem that needs to be solved.

• To ensure the business meets these, you can bring insight and expertise in how user needs have changed over time.

4. Experience of prototyping
• You can create and rapidly iterate stimulus for design research and support the team to visualise potential policy interventions.

• You can look at strategic service design end-to-end.

• You know how to involve your team, stakeholders and users and build feedback and validation into your ways of working.