Senior Service Designer

Job description

Defra’s design team is part of a wider user-centred design group as well as the wider community of over 800 designers working in the UK government. Find out more about the design community.

Our approach puts user needs at the heart of digital development. We design and build user centred public services that help our superb food, farming and fisheries industries, enhance our beautiful rural environment, and better protect against flooding, disease and other natural threats.

As a Senior Service Designer, your job will be to design accessible public and internal services that are simple for everyone to use.

You’ll be excited by the challenge of understanding user needs and policy goals to support strategy and decision making, and experienced at visualising whole services – both end-to-end and front-to-back, across business areas and government departments, to reduce or remove issues and problems.

You’ll work in a multidisciplinary team, alongside user researchers, interaction designers, business analysts, content designers, product owners, delivery managers and developers to deliver world-class, user-centred services that help the government transform the way it delivers services so they are more efficient, simpler, faster and easier to use.

Responsibilities

• Align communication with service managers, product owners and policy colleagues to define user journeys and articulate the vision for products and services
• Identify opportunities for service improvement and cost reduction and improvement within existing services
• Understand user needs and track interactions across departmental and organisational boundaries
• Create as is user journeys, highlighting pain points, dependencies, areas for improvements and hypothesis to test
• Design the interactions and building blocks that make up the service
• Create service prototypes to test ideas and assumptions
• Influence performance reporting so we measure and target improvements to things that matter to users
• Ensure that interactions and user journeys across a service are rational and consistent
• Act as an authority on service design, training and mentoring other service designers and contribute to the design community within Defra and across government

Skills and Experience

• Experience of understanding user needs and designing services that support those needs
• Experience of analysing pain points within services and communicating design solutions that fulfil user needs and business outcomes
• Experience of working with user research and business analysis to inform design outcomes
• Experience of leading workshops and collaborating with senior stakeholders
• Evidence of driving awareness of service performance and improvement needs which have resulted in successful service outcomes
• Experience designing digital and non-digital services which are accessible, usable, and based on user needs
• Working at times from minimal evidence and responding positively to changing requirements