Service Designer

Job description

The goal of the Research Data Infrastructure Lab (RDI Lab) is to support our university’s academics throughout the research life-cycle, with means and expertise required for them to design and materialize their research by using modern data platforms and tooling. As research matures, the accompanying complexity of the technology stack supporting the work also increases. The RDI Lab aims to offer the right technical abstraction for various research profiles by leveraging industry-hardened, but also experimental, solutions.

The RDI Lab covers a broad landscape where it is futile to ‘do it all’. Therefore, we are looking for people who can smartly navigate the domain and are capable to discuss the reasoning behind several approaches with our researchers to support them in their decision-making and our platform design. The RDI Lab is a young team, with a lot of room for personal development and growth. We are looking for people who are not afraid to take initiative and are willing to take on a pioneering role in the development of our services. The RDI Lab covers the entire research life-cycle ranging from planning phase to data collection, analysis, publication and sharing of data with FAIR principles in mind. Over the past years, the team has focussed on establishing the foundational components such as version control systems and CI/CD (GitLab, GitHub, Bitbucket), infrastructure for deploying applications (OpenShift, Azure), lab support systems (ClusterMarket), Atlassian, Jira, Confluence and other essential tooling for researchers. We are now at the point to further develop these components into an integrated research experience. Where we want to work backwards from the intended user experiences and design the services and tooling accordingly.

Some examples of activities we do are consulting individual research projects through (solution) architecture and mature emerging domains such as Internet of Things and Smart Campus to facilitate a community and enable researchers to take their research to a new level. Our services are delivered both online and offline, through digital platforms accompanied with extensive in-person support because of the continuously evolving requirements that come with the research context.

What does the job entail?

• As Service Designer, you will be responsible for pro-actively driving Customer and User Experience within the development of our services and IT infrastructure.
• You will become an essential part of our RDI Lab team to develop and further operationalize new tooling and services for our university;
• You will bring in the user perspective through contextual research and the creation of assets such as customer and user journeys, service blueprints, personas that describe both the as-is and envisioned future-state of our services.

What will you be doing?

• UX research, to capture the experiences of our researchers and supporting staff in their research projects, to understand their needs and pain points and translate those into narrative, visual stories that make the experiences tangible for our team and our stakeholders;
• Service & UX Design, create and maintain a holistic view of the service and its touchpoints, creating concepts and advice for improvements and new features, driven by a clear prioritization and rationale supported by UX research.

Job requirements

• Effective communication skills and a proactive and flexible mindset to empathize with the variety of issues our researchers face while designing and developing their research environments;
• Experience in UX research and design, preferably in a multistakeholder B2B context;
• Experience in driving the creation of a service design strategy and roadmap, leveraging assets such as customer journey maps, service blueprints, personas, etc;
• Fluency in English, both in speaking and writing.

Conditions of employment

• A challenging job in a dynamic setting, where you can develop both your technical skills and communication competences;
• A unique mix between academic and industrial environment, due to our close collaboration with research groups at the university and with our industrial partners;
• A competitive salary scheme (salary scale 11 with max € 5.929,- gross p/m) in accordance with the Collective Labour Agreement for Dutch Universities The salary level depends on your experience, education and knowledge. On top of this you also receive extra annual holiday allowance (8% in May), an end-of-year allowance (8.3% in December, a so-called 13th check.);
• An attractive package of fringe benefits, including an excellent technical infrastructure,  excellent sports facilities, savings schemes, and 41 days of holiday based on 40 hours a week. Foreign experts may benefit from the 30% tax ruling facility in order to get a higher net salary, the TU/e facilitates you in the application to our local tax authority.