Service Designer

Job Description 

We’re looking for a Service Designer who is passionate about designing digital services that are simple enough for everyone to use. You’ll play a key role in building our capability to design and continuously iterate world-class, user-centred, inclusive services for internal and external users. The Digital Delivery team at HMCTS is redesigning and rebuilding our courts and tribunal services around the needs of our users – ensuring our services are accessible, easy to use, digital (where necessary and appropriate) and well supported for all users.

Within Digital Delivery, the User-Centred Design team works with HMCTS projects and programmes to support our core design principle of being user-led in everything we do. As a service designer, you’ll work closely with user researchers, analysts and frontline staff to understand pain points for our internal and external users, then design, test and iterate consistent ways to fix these issues. This role will involve leading on the service design for a product or service, working with interaction design, content design and user research professionals to deliver user-centred solutions.

Key Responsibilities

We are looking for a service designer with an interest in:

• Designing systems based on user needs who can identify the simplest of a variety of approaches
• Interpreting the needs of technical and business stakeholders and managing stakeholder expectations to influence user-centred change
• Making and recommending decisions, building consensus between services or independent stakeholders around user-centred solutions to design challenges
• Bringing people together to form a motivated team
• Identifying, communicating and working within constraints, challenging the validity of constraints when appropriate and ensuring HMCTS and cross-government design and service standards are being met

You’ll be expected to:

• Design services that work for different users across the various channels we offer for court and tribunals service journeys, developing service journey maps, service blueprints and high-level prototypes
• Work with judges, operational leaders, technical teams and other key stakeholders to facilitate the co-design process; developing a deep understanding of their needs, managing expectations and agreeing service propositions
• Work as an embedded team member within agile delivery teams, helping manage and visualise outcomes, prioritise work and develop service roadmaps from minimum viable products to full live services
• Be an active member of HMCTS’ user-centred design community, collaborating with others and using your experience and specialist knowledge to coach and mentor others
• Support other designers and take an active role in your own development, building your experience through shadowing, goal-setting, coaching/mentoring and developing a wider understanding of design approaches, tools and techniques and what’s appropriate for different settings
• Actively participate in user research, factoring research findings into actionable insight to inform service development 

Essential skills

• You’ll be comfortable working with other research or design professionals to help key stakeholders understand the importance and value of a user-centred approach to designing court and tribunals services
• You’ll understand the need for evidence- and context-based design, using insights from research to find, test and refine the best solutions to meet user and business needs across whole user journeys
• You’ll advise teams on tools, teams and methods needed to solve user problems and support our growing community of practice, advocating for user-centred approaches across HMCTS
• You’ll have the opportunity to help build the UCD profession at HMCTS and be part of creating the right conditions for supportive communities of practice to grow and thrive – and can expect support for your own growth and development as a design practitioner in government.
• You’ll evaluate new and existing services against strategies, frameworks, design systems and policies to ensure that user and business requirements are met – and explain to teams what happens if they aren’t.
• You’ll work closely with other designers, researchers, analysts and technical experts to help our users complete their goals quickly and easily; minimising support costs (and other failure demand) as well as improving efficiency and reducing the time needed to process applications.