Service Design

The opportunity

This role sits within EY Seren’s Service Design team.

We’re one of the biggest and most mature Service Design functions in the world, the elder statesperson of Service Design if you will. We’ve been around for 17 years, and been part of EY for the last four.

The work we do is big. Big in scale, big in ambition, big in impact – and big projects get taken seriously. We don’t create outputs for the sake of it. We don’t create work that sits in draws, never to be revisited. We create work that is driven to implementation.

The work we do is varied. We work across sectors (from government, healthcare to financial services and FMGC) and tackle a huge variety of problems in a huge variety of ways. One week you could be interviewing customers in their homes to understand how they make sense of their money, the next month you could be leading a workshop in Whitehall to articulate how a government department can embed innovation in their organisation.

We take our practitioners seriously and you will be given the freedom and support to develop your craft, your thinking, your work and your career in a way that suits you and delivers for the practice and your clients.

The role

We are looking for a Junior Service Designer to join the Service Design Practice at EY Seren.

This role is open to recent graduates from BA or MA design courses or related courses as well as candidates with relevant industry experience that are seeking to build a career in service design.

There are a couple of things that we ask of everybody.

• You’ll be fascinated by service in all it’s forms with a desire to deliver great solutions in the teams we put together for clients, to help them improve existing services, invent new ones, and ultimately grow businesses.
• You will be endlessly inquisitive, and ruthlessly user focused and able to use a combination of logic, empathy, rigour and storytelling to articulate a customer or business problem before working creatively and technically to articulate a service that solves it.
• You will be a natural collaborator. Ideas breed ideas, and so we work multi disciplinary teams and embed clients in our process. We work in the open, we share our thinking early and we build on each other’s contribution.
• You will be visual. We work generatively. We create things to clarify thinking, align understanding and move towards a solution that works.
• You will be iterative. No-one gets it right first time. We don’t expect to.
• You will be ambitious yet realistic in your solutions. Our work sits in the sweet spot between desirable, viable, feasible and allowable. Getting it there is a big part of what we do.
• You will be a doer AND a thinker, and know when to switch from one to the other and how to create time and space for both.
• You will navigate complexity. People, organisations, technology, policies, regulations. Designing services puts you at the centre of complexity. We need to make sense of it all quickly, and flex and adapt to move through it effectively.
• You will be competent in service design methods, and know how to shepherd clients through a service design process, creating good work and advocates for EY Seren as you go.
• You will be a self starter and have an explorative mindset, creating new perspectives and identifying the spaces you can be impactful for both EY Seren and it’s clients.

Your key responsibilities

• Delivery of high-quality design assets that articulate customer insights, journeys and experiences
• Provides day to day support on the application of EY Seren methodologies
• Show initiative to collaborate with other disciplines to deliver project tasks (Eg: Product, business or visual design)
• Undertake project work as directed by the Senior Consultant, Principal and Practice Directors
• Monitor own delivery against project requirements, effectively prioritise and deliver to deadlines
• Actively seek to understand project requirements, roles of all team members, aims and deliverables
• Contribute to the development of the Service Design Practice through participation at team meetings, events and activities.
• Show an active interest in the development of Service Design Practice methodology and make recommendations to Senior and Principal Consultants and the Service Design Practice Director
• Shares project/client learning and outcomes with team and company through EY Seren’s formal and in-formal events
• Tell the EY Seren story through articulation of
  • EY Seren methodologies, and their client value
  • EY Seren’s mission statement
  • case studies of service design projects
  • joint EY and EY Seren offering.

Skills and attributes for success

• Strong visual communication skills and related software skills
• Analytical in exploratory mindset – to work through organisational and business details to identify tensions and opportunities
• Creative intuition – able to apply a wide range of creative techniques to deliver innovative conceptual thinking.
• Presentation skills – able to tailor content to internal and external audiences. Able to field questions with credibility.
• Bigger picture thinking – Can see the bigger picture and find direction from depth, insight and complexity

To qualify for the role you must have

• Demonstrable experience of: contextual research, quantitative research, journey mapping, persona building, facilitation creative sessions and service prototyping
• Demonstrable knowledge of common Service Design techniques and their application in organisations
• Relevant experience in Service Design along with an understanding of related design disciplines such as; Visual Design, UXD, IA, UI design, Spatial Design, Business Design, Organisation Design
• Knowledge of design research skills across qualitative and quantitative methodologies and experience in how to use them effectively in collaboration, able support customer research, both contextual in-depth and remote large-scale
• Ability to write to a high standard, fluent in English, additional major languages also valued.
• Effectively prioritise and deliver to deadlines
• Able to present a portfolio showing all above
• A willingness to travel and work overseas as and when required.