Service Designer

We’re looking for service designers who are motivated to support and protect our communities by delivering better services.

The Home Office keeps our UK citizens safe and our country secure. We play a fundamental role in the security and economic prosperity of the UK.

The Home Office Policy and Innovation Lab (CoLab) is a creative team of designers and researchers, that work closely with policy and operations teams from across the Home Office to bring user-centred and explorative approaches to policy making.

CoLab works in policy spaces that require a deeper understanding of service users, like how we can improve the experiences of asylum seekers in the UK or how we can improve users’ experiences of the passport system.

We’re looking for service designers to help us deliver impactful policies in the Migration and Borders area, which spans asylum, border security, visas and immigration and passports.

As a Service Designer, you’ll have experience delivering better services. You’ll look at the end-to-end experience of our services, working with data to identify problems and reimagine how the service should work. This work will consider both the front of house experience as well as the behind-the-scenes services.

You’ll be confident working in a fast-paced environment as part of a multi-disciplinary team, and adept at gathering and using evidence to inform design decisions and measure policy and service outcomes.

You’ll work closely with user researchers, other service designers and policy professionals, with access to a range of other specialist skillsets when required.

Your main day to day responsibilities will be:

• Identifying opportunities to improve the performance or management of existing services.
• Creating compelling service solutions by drawing on multiple inputs, such as user research, operational insight, data patterns, organisational intent, or technical architecture.
• Understanding and appropriately balancing the needs of users, providers and government when making design decisions.
• Helping to develop the end-to-end view on projects, creating service visualisations, scope, and explore their work, and align effort towards a service vision.
• Rapidly creating sketches, diagrams, and lo-fi prototypes to share and test ideas.
• Presenting findings and related recommendations to team members and stakeholders.
• Managing logistics of workshop sessions, including planning and scheduling sessions and recruiting participants.
• Identifying and raising any blockers to design activities.

Due to business requirements this post is available on a full time/flexible working basis. Where business needs allow, some roles may be suitable for a combination of office and home-based working. Where this is the case, employees will be expected to spend a minimum of 60% of their working time in the office. Applicants can raise any queries to the email address at the bottom of the advert.

We value diversity and inclusion and welcome applications from the widest diversity of backgrounds, cultures, and experiences. We particularly encourage applications from women, people with disabilities and LGBT+ as they are currently under-represented in the Home Office at this grade level. Appointments will be made on merit based on fair and open competition.

 Watch this video to hear from members of the team talking about the projects they work on and their experience of working here.

Essential Criteria

You will be assessed against the following skills and experience during the selection process:

• Prototyping and concept creation: able to independently develop prototypes and sketches for more complex projects. Able to use design software or physical mock-ups or code to visualise and test concepts.
• Service design: independently contributes to the design and implementation of services or policies, ensuring they meet user needs and target outcomes. Participates in managing the design process for smaller projects.
• Accessibility and inclusion: able to regularly apply accessibility standards to their work and begins to understand the broader aspects of inclusive design.
• Service analysis: independently maps and analyses service processes from a user perspective. Identifies opportunities for improvement and frames problems in terms of user needs.
• Collaboration: actively facilitates group activities and seeks feedback for continuous improvement.
• Communicate, Persuade and Advocate: comfortable advocating for UCD principles to peers and immediate stakeholders through well-prepared presentations. Plans and facilitates engaging workshops to engage different stakeholders.

We’ll assess you against these technical skills during the selection process:

• Prototyping and concept creation
• Service design
• Accessibility and inclusion
• Service analysis Collaboration
• Collaboration
• Communicate, Persuade and Advocate