Senior Service Designer

HMRC is looking for a Senior Service Designer who is passionate about User Centred Design, supporting the work of our Product & User Centred Design teams.

HMRC’s Product & User Centred Design provide consultancy services to major programmes and business areas across the department, helping shape some of HMRC’s most impactful change.

This approach has been highly successful and we’re now looking to grow this capability to bring user centred design into more, early project and programme thinking, ensuring that we design the right things for our users.

The role offers an amazing opportunity to improve services for millions of people, influencing decisions through evidence and being a voice for our customers.

This is an exciting time to join an organisation that probably doesn’t work how you’d imagine a government organisation would.

The successful individual can look forward to a supportive environment that will provide all the training and experience that they need to succeed.

Our blogs can tell you a bit more about what we do and how we do it.

https://www.civil-service-careers.gov.uk/hmrc-meettheddatteam/

See what it’s like to work at HMRC: find out more about us or ask our colleagues a question. Questions relating to an individual application must be emailed as detailed later in this advert.

You will take business challenges through our process to understand user needs upfront, and assess all possible solution options without being led in one direction or another. You’ll be solving tricky problems, and thinking broadly about how services and policies interact.

With complex services we have a complex user base – millions of people have to use these services, which means a broad spectrum of different needs and outcomes. You will have an active role within the profession to shape the design of our biggest services.

You will work on a multi-disciplinary team, alongside user researchers, product managers, analysts, innovation and technology experts, developing user centred designs which add value to users, exploring opportunities for improvement and influencing stakeholders through evidence, engagement and effective communication.

You’ll also be part of our active and supportive design community in HMRC and across government.

Key responsibilities.

As a Senior Service Designer you will;

• provide service design expertise on multiple projects and direction for collaborative teams.
• develop user-centred service propositions.
• analyse pain points within services and build design solutions that fulfil user needs and business outcomes.
• understand user needs and design services that meet them and collaborate with multi-disciplinary teams to understand user behaviour and feedback.
• build collaborative relationships with stakeholders across teams and service domains.
• map as-is journeys and create new blueprints for services and processes across channels.
• create sketches, scenarios, diagrams, maps, and prototypes.
• use facilitation skills to enable others to see where improvements could be made.
• analyse pain points within services, and build design solutions that fulfil user needs and business outcomes.
• participate in HMRC’s cross-government design communities, mentoring and coaching more junior designers.

Essential Criteria 

You should demonstrate proven experience in;

• Designing services that meet user needs and are delivered through digital products and/or non-digital services
• Collaborating with teams and stakeholders to help them understand the problem space and define the problem that needs to be solved and work through challenges
• Using data and research to influence design thinking e.g. creating diagrams and sketches that clearly communicate user journeys, interactions and other behaviours through services (you will need to show evidence of this as part of your application, including links to your service design portfolio in your personal statement)
• Planning and running service design activities, including;
  • planning and running workshops with stakeholders and end-users
  • leading the analysis and synthesis of outputs to create user journeys and service flows
• Using a variety of methods for prototyping and iterating products and end-to-end services
• Understanding of digital trends and emerging technologies
• Working collaboratively and effectively with multidisciplinary teams at pace

It’s desirable that you have;

• Understanding of the Government Service Standard and Service Manual
• Understanding of agile approaches and experience of working in agile teams

We’ll assess you against these behaviours during the selection process:

• Communicating and Influencing

We’ll assess you against these technical skills during the selection process:

• Evidence and context based design
• Strategic Thinking
• User Focus