Senior Service Designer

IBM is looking for experienced Service Designers to join our 100+ person strong design team based in London. We work with UK clients across all sectors, including Boots, Scottish Government, BP, NHS, Wimbledon, Lloyds and many more.

IBM iX is the business design and Customer Experience Transformation arm of IBM Services (IBM’s consulting business). We combine progressive strategy, human-centered design and transformative technology to imagine the brand experiences of the future and help our clients make them real. Our global network of 17,000 business designers across 57 global studios is supported by the deep industry experience and technology capabilities of IBM. We are a top enterprise partner for Adobe, Apple, Salesforce, ServiceNow, SAP and Workday and are consistently ranked by analysts as an industry leader in Digital Strategy, Digital Business Transformation, Customer Experience, and CRM.

We believe there has never been a greater time to be a creator and a more challenging time to be in business. We help our clients grow and change their business, by design.

We reinvent enterprise
We apply strategies to analyse, identify, and recommend new business opportunities to help companies future-proof themselves and evolve how they work.

We transform experiences
We use AI and human intuition to discover actionable insights that lead to well-designed and engineered experiences that drive measurable outcomes at scale.

We maximise impact
From attracting and retaining customers to driving commerce and managing operations, we use advanced design and development methodologies to unlock the potential of technology.

Design culture at IBM

At IBM, design is practiced on an unprecedented scale and depth—and no other company addresses the designer experience with the same level of intent. IBM has more than 2,500 formally-trained designers and researchers embedded across 25 IBM businesses and has set the industry standard for enterprise design programs.

We think the systems of the world should work in service of people. At the heart of our human-centered mission is Enterprise Design Thinking: a framework to solve our users’ problems at the speed and scale of the modern enterprise.

Diversity is as important to IBM as innovation; both are essential to the success of our business. IBM has a long history of championing diversity (look it up!) which enhances the innovation we offer our clients. It also offers opportunities for IBMers and our clients to be their authentic selves at work, and achieve their full potential.

Service Design at IBM

Service designers work to create end-to-end enterprise experiences for users that span face-to-face, analogue and digital interactions. They use human-centered approaches to shape and define the value exchange between a service provider and the user across touch points, time, and channels.

As a Service Designer, you
Work with product owners, programme directors and design teams to develop design concepts across complex services
Design concept journeys, blueprints, and roadmaps that communicate how the end-to-end user experience can be elevated
Facilitate the collective understanding of the end-to-end, front-to-back experience by mapping the orchestration of events at the intersection of technology, business and design
Shape how behind-the-scenes processes and support functions interact with each other and how these impact the design process
Define key UX and organisational measurements used to track and prove the service delivers positive outcomes for both users and the business
Generate insights through research with users, staff and stakeholders to shape a holistic view of the total user experience
Analyse, consolidate, and communicate research findings to stakeholders in order to strategically frame, validate and quantify the problem being solved and help inform the wider strategic roadmap of initiatives
Understand the importance of delivering inclusive and accessible services and advocate for this approach across technology, design and business
Have experience working with government delivery programs under the GDS Service Manual or Scottish Digital First Service Standard frameworks

Core skills and experience

User-centred evidence-based design. You know how to design systems for use across multiple services and can identify the simplest approach out of a variety of approaches. You can identify constraints and can communicate about these and work within them. You know how to challenge the validity of constraints. You can ensure standards are being met. You know how to share best practice and can coach others. You can look at strategic service design end to end. You know how to give direction on which tools or methods to use. You are experienced in meeting the needs of users across a variety of channels. You can bring insight and expertise in how user needs have changed over time to ensure these are met by the business. You know how to apply strategic thinking in how to provide the best service for the end user.
Inclusive design. You understand the importance of diversity and inclusion and you know how to include all kinds of users in appropriate research and design activities to help you and your team deliver accessible and inclusive services.
Prototyping. You approach prototyping as a team activity, actively soliciting prototypes and testing with others. You can establish design patterns and iterate them. You can use a variety of methods of prototyping and choose the most appropriate ones.
Facilitating decisions and risks. You can work with higher impact or more complex risks. You know how to build consensus between services or independent stakeholders. You can lead others to make good design decisions. You know how to apply different risk methodologies in proportion to the risk in question.
Collaboration and communication. You know how to work collaboratively within a group, actively networking with others and varying feedback for the appropriate time to ensure the discussion sticks. You can use your initiative to identify problems or issues in the team dynamic and rectify them. You confidently raise issues with the team resulting in productive responses. You can listen to the needs of technical and business stakeholders, and interpret them in a way that is clear for both audiences. You know how to manage stakeholder expectations. You can be flexible and you are capable of proactive and reactive communication. You know how to facilitate difficult discussions within the team or with diverse senior stakeholders.
Agile team practices. You understand user-centred design practices and know how to embed them into an agile workflow to deliver timely findings. You can work in an open, iterative and collaborative way in a multidisciplinary team. You have a foundational understanding of other design disciplines such as UX design and User Research.
Strategic thinking. You can lead the design and implementation of strategy, directing the evaluation of strategies and policies to ensure business requirements are being met.

Required Technical and Professional Expertise

• Experienced service designer with strong ability to deliver rapid discovery of new concepts, preferably prior experience in public sector.
• Strong stakeholder management and communication skills, with experience working in agency or consulting.