Lead Service Designer

Our ideal candidate
• We are looking for a Senior Service Designer to take a collaborative design approach to help teams solve whole problems for users.
• You’ll be an experienced designer who can work on your own initiative and can influence and mentor others.
• You’ll be well versed in design thinking methodologies and approaches to help solve complex problems and improve the delivery of front line services.
• A solid understanding and first-hand experience producing visual assets such as service/process maps and user journeys, comprehensive knowledge of prototyping (low to mid-fidelity), and a keen interest in UX/UI design.
Job description

The Team
You will join a friendly and collaborative team and will have opportunities for learning and development to help you grow within the role. You will receive all the support you need to succeed alongside the ability to shape the role, identifying where you see opportunities to innovate and deliver new approaches.

The Department
The Department for Education (DfE) is responsible for children’s services and education, including higher and further education policy, apprenticeships and wider skills in England.

At our heart, we are the department for realising potential. We enable children and learners to thrive, by protecting the vulnerable and ensuring the delivery of excellent standards of education, training and care. This helps realise everyone’s potential – and that powers our economy, strengthens society, and increases fairness.
As the government sets out to rebuild the economy after Covid-19, the department’s focus now is to drive economic recovery, improve educational standards across our country, and level up opportunity for all.

It is important to us that our organisation is more diverse, so we encourage applications from people of all backgrounds and identities. We are especially keen to hear from people from ethnic minority background who are currently under-represented.

At DfE, we are proud of the commitment we make to diversity and inclusion and of the progress we have made. We have a variety of staff networks and groups for all employees to join, whether you identify yourself as someone who the network is aimed towards or if you just have an interest in diversity and believe inclusion matters.

Find out more:
https://www.gov.uk/government/organisations/department-for-education/about

Role and responsibilities

The Service Designer will:

• Design and lead on developing accessible public facing services that are simple enough for everyone to use, working as part of the National Careers Service as it develops in light of the FE white paper and the planned reform of the careers infrastructure.

• Make decisions about the design of the service, utilising user research, content design and interaction design professionals to deliver user centred systems.

• Challenge the understanding of user needs and policy goals to support strategy and decision making and will be experienced at visualising whole services – both end to end and front to back, across business areas and government departments.

• Ensure that we place the least burden on our users when implementing technology solutions to deliver against user needs and government requirements for the Service.

• Help others to think through, communicate and understand how things could be, using facilitation skills, sketches, scenarios and diagrams such as maps, the target operation model, blueprints and prototypes.
Responsibilities

The role holder will be responsible for the following:

• Aligning and leading communication with colleagues to define user journeys.

• Identifying opportunities for service improvement, cost reduction and improvement within existing services.

• Understanding user needs and track interactions across departmental and organisational boundaries.

• Analysing research findings, data, insight gathering, critical thinking and concept generation.

• Leading the design perspective in discussions with teams and stakeholders.

• Highlighting opportunities to establish benchmarks and identifying measures to track the impact of changes.

• Leading on ensuring that interactions and user journeys across a service are rational and consistent with the delivery of careers advice as part of a holistic service.

• Ensure all new systems and technologies for the National Careers Service consider the full user journey across ESFA and DfE and other government departments e.g. DWP to reduce burden.

Essential Experience and Skills:

• Experience of leading design direction based on evidence.

• Experience of creating high quality service design deliverables.

• Experience of understanding user needs and designing services that support those needs.

• Experience of analysing, communicating, and sharing design solutions that fulfil user needs.

• An ability to talk about, and advocate for, user-centred design in a way that other people understand.

• Experience of working with research and business analysis to inform design decisions.

• Experience of leading workshops and collaborating with senior stakeholders.

• Experience of driving awareness of service performance and improvement needs which have resulted.

Desirable Experience and Skills:

• Be familiar with wider government strategy and position around digital and design.

• Know how to make services accessible to the greatest range of people and needs.

• Be able to influence the work or thinking of others in a constructive way, presenting information and arguments clearly and convincingly.

• Be experienced with user centred design in an agile environment as well as how to use hypotheses in design, make evidence-based design decisions and facilitate others in an organisation to do so.

. • Be familiar with the government service design manual, service standards and design patterns.

• Have experience of working in an operational delivery, stakeholder engagement, or careers related role.

Desirable criteria will only be assessed in the event of a tie break situation, in order to make an informed decision.

The role holder will be expected to travel frequently to the Coventry office.