Service Designer

As a Service Designer, you will be a confident and competent designer who can develop designs based on evidence of user needs and organisational outcomes.

Having a relevant degree and experience in a role titled ‘service designer’ is not a requirement. What’s important is understanding how a service works to meet people’s needs.

Collaborating with multidisciplinary colleagues you’ll be trusted to make good decisions and also recognise when to ask for further guidance and support. Interpreting evidence-based research, you’ll incorporate this into your work and raise awareness of how to make service accessible and inclusive. Engaging with and contributing to the Scottish Government service design community of practice

YOUR MAIN RESPONSIBILITIES:

Communicating between the technical and non-technical:  

• Listen to the needs of technical and non-technical stakeholders and interpret them.
• Effectively manage and communicate stakeholder expectations.
• Support or host difficult discussions within the team or with diverse senior stakeholders. 

Community collaboration: 

• Work collaboratively in a group, actively networking with others.
• Create connections that help inform better service design.
• Adapt feedback to ensure its effective and lasting.
• Use your initiative to identify problems or issues in the team dynamic and resolve them.

Digital perspective: 

• Respond to changes in technology, adapting your approach accordingly.
• Make decisions to meet user needs in the government context.
• Design services to meet user needs and understand the importance of designing inclusive services for a diverse range of users.

Evidence- and context-based design: 

• Absorb large amounts of conflicting information and use it to generate and test designs.
• Create and document iterations based on evidence.

Prototyping: 

• Approach prototyping as a team activity, actively soliciting prototypes, and testing with others.
• Establish design patterns and iterate them. Use a variety of prototyping methods and choose the most appropriate.

User focus: 

• Collaborate with subject matter experts and users to collate user needs evidence. Explain the difference between user needs and the desires of the user.
• Champion user research to focus on all users, including those who have barriers to using digital tools.
• Prioritise and define approaches to understand the user story, guiding others in doing so.
• Offer recommendations on the best tools and methods to use.

Working within constraints: 

• Identify, communicate, and work within constraints.
• Challenge the validity of constraints.
• Ensure standards are being met.