Service Designer

The role of Design is to solve problems and to ensure the solutions marry user need with deliverables that are viable to the business. In doing so Design will create useful, intuitive, innovative, and delightful products that users love, by ensuring the business is identifying and asking itself the right questions, and the right rigor is applied to the products our users interact with.

Service Designers at Insights design the end-to-end journey of a service, helping a user complete goals, while helping the business deliver its objectives. They look at the Big Picture view and understand service improvements/developments, spending the majority of their time in the initial problem space. They help guide the shape of the design system as they uncover user needs, business requirements and service problems, and might create journeys and maps, infographics, documentation, define accessibility standards.

Service Designers are part of the Research & Design team, part of the Customer and Digital Function. Research and Design is a cross functional team supporting Learning & Experience, Future Experience & Partnerships, Marketing and Product Technology in delivering the right end to end experience for our customers and the business.

Designers at Insights are discipline-led in a specific aspect of design but are expected to have a broad understanding and knowledge across design and research as a whole.

Skills required to be a Service Designer

You will need the following skills for this role, although the level of expertise for each will vary, depending on the role level.

–  Agile working: You know how to coach and lead teams in Agile and Lean practices, determining the right approach for the team to take and evaluating this through the life of a project. You can think of new and innovative ways of working to achieve the right outcomes. You are able to act as a recognised expert and advocate for the approaches, continuously reflecting and challenging the team.

–  Analysis and synthesis: You understand and can help teams apply a range of methods to analyse research data and synthesise findings. You know how to engage sceptical colleagues in analysis and synthesis. You can advise on choice and application of techniques and can critique colleagues’ findings to assure best practice.

–  Communication skills: You can mediate between people and mend relationships, communicating with stakeholders at all levels. You know how to manage stakeholders’ expectations and facilitate discussions across high risk and complexity or under constrained timescales. You can speak on behalf of and represent the community to large audiences inside and outside of the business.

–  Digital perspective. You have the ability to apply a digital understanding to your work. You can identify and implement solutions for assisted digital.

–  Evidence and 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.

–  Experience of working within constraints: You know how to influence, challenge and coach. You can anticipate how constraints might change and know where to challenge or remove constraints.

–  Facilitating decisions and risks. You can work with higher impact or more complex risks. You know how to build consensus between services or independent stakeholders. You can lead others to make good design decisions. You know how to apply different risk methodologies in proportion to the risk in question.

–  Inclusive research: You can help the wider business understand the diversity of users of our services. You know how to guide organisations to adopt inclusive practices and apply what they learn to design and deliver accessible services that work for all users.

–  Prototyping: You are experienced in using a variety of methods of prototyping. You know how to share best practice and can coach others. You can look at strategic service design end to end.

–  Research skills: You understand and have experience of basic user research methods. You know when to use those methods and how to apply them correctly. You know how to involve your team in research activities.

–  Role discipline: You have both knowledge and experience in the application of your discipline. You are a recognised specialist, adviser, thought leader in your discipline and can mentor others in best-practice use, through your own experience of your discipline.

–  Stakeholder management: You know how to direct the strategic approach for stakeholder relationships, establishing and promoting the meeting of stakeholder objectives. You can influence important senior stakeholders and provide an arbitration function.

–  Strategic thinking: You can lead the design and implementation of strategy, directing the evaluation of strategies to ensure business requirements are being met.

–  User focus: You know how to give direction on which tools or methods to use. You are experienced in meeting the needs of users across a variety of channels. You can bring insight and expertise in how user needs have changed over time to ensure these are met by the business. You know how to apply strategic thinking in how to provide the best service for the end user.

What You will do to succeed

–  Discover: You will help the business to identify, understand and prioritse problems to deliver maximum value to it and our customers.

–  Define: You will uncover their needs of our customers and that of the business, and design services that deliver against them.

–  Develop: You will collaborate with other researchers, designers, and stakeholders to take services from concept to delivery, evidencing design thinking through appropriate methodologies.

–  Deliver: You will constantly evaluate the success of our services, seeking to understand how we iterate upon them.

–  Responsibility / Ownership: You will focus predominately on the strategic problems this business is facing and support the work reception, triage and prioritisation of these problems within the team’s backlog.

–  Authority / Autonomy: You will take the lead on the work, mostly working autonomously and only requiring sense checking of method or approach. You are able to delegate sub tasks to other team members and manage the dependencies on delivering your own work.

–  Impact / Reach: The output of your work will predominantly be consumed by your function’s leadership or the executive level of the business.

How You will show up

–  You will be comfortable working with autonomy, using your own initiative and taking ownership of tasks and projects from start to finish.

–  You will embrace failure and be open to positively, collaboratively and constructively critiquing and evaluating your work and the work of colleagues.

–  You will be a team player, willing to step out of your comfort zone for the benefit of the team.

–  You will have strong communication and presentation skills, with an ability to engage and collaborate with a variety of stakeholders.

What You are great at

–  You will have a proven and successful record of having delivered a project, from the design stage all the way through to its launch.

–  You can translate concepts and requirements into user experiences, choosing the appropriate mediums.

–  Exploring multiple solutions for a given problem through design exploration, mock-ups, prototypes visualisations, storyboards, to test your ideas and communicate them internally and externally.

–  You can validate your design thinking using qualitative and quantitative methodologies.

–  You can design for Inclusive/Accessible Design.

–  You have experience in working in research-led design teams.

–  You have and intense curiosity about people and their problems and a genuine curiosity and a real desire to understand users, clients, and stakeholders through interviewing, observations and surveying.

–  You can work with stakeholders to define and focus on business problems, and approach these problems applying logic and creativity.

–  You can work with our Interaction Designers and Product Owners to bring concepts and requirements to life.

–  You will help to shape user stories ready from Scrum, through identifying and evidencing user needs, business requirements and technical constraints.

–  You can temper idealism with pragmatism, understanding you can’t exclusively represent the users, and also have to consider business needs and find solutions that satisfy both business and user goals, which are technically deliverable.

–  You understand the diversity of users of our services and know how to include all kinds of users in appropriate research activities to help teams deliver accessible services.

–  Prototyping and Usability testing (ideally in Figma, Maze).

–  You have a foundation education in a Design craft, HCI or design engineering.

–  You can contribute to the work of the Research and Design community, building successful teams through understanding team styles and influencing as well as motivating team members.

–  You can advocate and communicate what a team does to create trust and authenticity and can respond to challenge.

–  You know how to give and receive constructive feedback, facilitating the feedback loop.

–  You can play a role in the individual personal development of junior team members through their mentoring.