Senior Service Designer

Your new role

We are recruiting for a Senior Service Designer within Digital Services, which forms part of our capability to support the creation of safe, accessible and sustainable end to end services. You will help deliver the right experiences for our colleagues and customers that consider equality, diversity and inclusion across our business and operational services.

As a Senior Service Designer, you will be confident in applying the principles of design thinking, and lead research to provide projects with a clear direction and help ensure the business arrives at the right solution in a collaborative and outcome-focused way.

It will be your responsibility to lead a range of design activities to provide and assure service designs, supporting informed decisions. You will also help to identify and build our own group’s capabilities and service offerings to set the direction for the design of services.

You will prioritise the needs of the service users and their safety and be motivated by the desire to understand and promote the needs of our service users – listening to, engaging, communicating, and feeding back with them.

This role can be flexibly based in one of our UK offices. We are a flexible working organisation and are pleased to offer the above role as a hybrid role. There is an expectation that you would work from one of our National Highways offices for 40% of your time.

What you’ll be leading on

• Leading medium to large-sized design activities independently, from initial research and insights gathering to delivery of final design deliverables, such as user journeys, service blueprints, and wireframes, collaborating closely with other designers and stakeholders.
• Conducting user research with empathy, including interviews, focus groups and design thinking workshops, to generate insights on the colleague experience and using that to create human-centred services.
• Collaborating with stakeholders and clients, understanding their aims, presenting design concepts and solutions, reaching consensus and incorporating feedback into design iterations and building relationships to ensure ongoing engagement and support.
• Contributing to the creation, development and improvement of design processes, systems and guidelines, and helping to ensure they are followed by the team. Supporting design leadership in setting and implementing our strategic direction.
• Taking part in mentoring and coaching, through inviting and delivering constructive feedback, sharing experiences and failures, and helping colleagues develop their design skills and emotional intelligence.
• Managing the workload of a small design team including internal and external resources, considering capacity, capability and delivery timescales.

To be successful you’ll need

• Experience producing high-quality service design deliverables, using design patterns, methodologies, and toolkits such as co-design, storytelling, idea generation, blueprinting, prototyping, and workshops.
• Ability to apply user research methodologies to capture user needs and service value, synthesising findings into actionable insights and recommendations.
• Able to apply human-centred design thinking principles and agile methodologies to develop and iterate on service design concepts and solutions.
• Strong communication skills – communicate effectively with technical and business stakeholders, translating user needs and insights into clear and actionable recommendations.
• Ability to challenge the status quo and provide positive challenge in projects, ensuring project teams think creatively, place the user at the heart of decision making, and design in line with the structured design principles.