Senior Service Designer

Do you have a passion for putting user needs at the centre of design?

Do you want to be part of a collaborative community of Service Designers?

Can you design services end-to-end and front-to-back?

Looking for an opportunity to work with cutting-edge technology at a massive scale that makes a critical difference to millions of people in need?

DWP Digital offers uniquely challenging and fulfilling careers for people interested in using their skills to make a genuine difference to society. We’re part of the UK’s biggest government department, and along with 86,000 colleagues, we support 22 million people every day to help them to find work and save for their future. Few other organisations globally provide the same opportunity to apply next-generation digital technology on a massive scale to issues which touch the lives of so many.

A Senior Service Designer is an experienced practitioner, with growing experience of complex projects or organisations. Using research, data and other evidence, they translate user needs into whole services (including non-digital parts).

A Senior Service Designer works closely with product owners, designers, user researchers and other senior stakeholders to help solve problems and align services to departmental goals. They are an advocate for best practice in service design, collaborate on cross-government design projects and keep up to date with industry changes.

Putting users’ needs at the heart of their work, a Senior Service Designer makes people’s interactions with the government as simple and quick as possible.

As a Senior Service Designer, you are an experienced practitioner.

You will have experience in driving awareness of service performance and improvement needs which have resulted in successful service outcomes.

You understand user needs and business or policy goals and are able to visualise whole services, both end to end and front to back, across business areas or departments in order to reduce or remove issues and problems.

You will be able to work alongside a Lead Service designer with senior stakeholders to establish service design methods, communication links with stakeholders, leading workshops and using design patterns to support strategy and decision making across their team or business area.

You are able to define good practice and make sure that useful guidance, tools and patterns are available across services and teams to solve recurring problems for users.

You will support the service design community by taking part in meet-ups to share work openly.

Role and Responsibilities

• Understand user needs and design services that meet them and collaborate with multidisciplinary teams to understand user behaviour and feedback.
• Demonstrate good working knowledge of service design in practice.
• Analyse research findings, data, insight gathering, critical thinking and concept generation.
• Have a strong grasp of qualitative and quantitative research methods to service user needs and work with researchers to conduct these studies.
• Lead workshops to drive actionable outcomes.
• Align and support the communication with product owners and policy colleagues to define the customer journey and articulate the vision for products and services.
• Analyse pain points within services and build design solutions that fulfil user needs and business outcomes.
• Help manage stakeholder needs across different areas with a focus on supporting discussions at senior departmental level.
• Contribute to building an open and collaborative culture within the department and the design community.
• Analyse and identify cost saving opportunities whilst implementing best practice service design.
• Own and create high quality service design deliverables, including personas, experience maps, insights packs, user flow maps, and service blueprints.
• Support the capability and promote service design in and beyond the department.