Service Designer

We are looking for a seasoned user researcher to shape how the UK’s government makes public policy and services.

We are running a research and design discovery in Autumn term. The team is building an influential new model for transforming how policy is made, including embedding robust evidence-led decision making that emphasises citizen engagement and systems thinking. The team works with individual government organisations to support them to transform how they make public policy and services so they deliver more meaningful outcomes for citizens. It creates networked opportunities for government organisations to collaborate on creating new patterns and better ways of working in the public sector.

We sit in the Transforming Policy Making workstrand which forms part of the cross-government Policy Profession Unit (PPU). Housed in the Department for Education our sibling teams are Policy Lab, other labs including DfE’s lab and the Open Innovation Team. PPU is transforming how the UK government makes policy and services. It works with government organisations across the UK. You can find out more about what we do on our blog at: https://publicpolicydesign.blog.gov.uk/

The team leads the cross-UK government policy design community (which includes the many policy labs from central and local government) and creates opportunities for policy design practitioners to learn and work together to establish policy design as core component of how government works.

The team plays an important part in delivering the government’s reform agenda and we are government’s experts on design and innovation. The team takes a multidisciplinary approach to our work in collaboration with other government professions, reform and innovation experts (in Cabinet Office, Number 10 data science, and beyond), and public research and design experts across government. We are building a multidisciplinary team of researchers, designers, delivery experts and subject matter experts.

This is an exciting opportunity to shape a growing team that influences the working practices of many public organisations and shape the future of how public services are made.

As senior user researcher you will:

• conduct research to inform methodology for various projects before they are rolled out

• research a model for diagnosing and improving how public policy and services are made in the UK

• research the capability of individual organisations and identify and exploit opportunities for them to work with others on establishing x-gov research and delivery infrastructure

• design, manage and conduct research to test new policy concepts and convert this into actionable service requirements (including user requirements gathering and early stage concept and prototype testing, guerrilla research, quantitative statistical surveys of service usage etc) ensuring the user need is fully understood in the service design

• grow capacity and capability and assure the quality of user research in the team

• work as part of a multidisciplinary team, with senior policymakers

• lead discussions at a senior departmental level and successfully negotiate change (e.g. operational, organisational, policy, financial or technology) to support the delivery of better services.

Responsibilities

The ideal candidate will have the following essential skills and experience:?

• business change management

• gathering user requirements for services

• audience modelling and user segmentation

• planning research activities including the schedule of activities, methods, and procurement of resources

• applying suitable research techniques to generate specific kinds of insights into user behaviour and needs, so that research activities are focused on delivering value to the end user

• finding and arranging participants and facilities to conduct user research activities, including work with user recruitment suppliers and writing effective screeners

• working confidentiality when interviewing, videoing, or collecting user data generally, and how data should be handled

• synthesis and analysis of evidence (user research and other types of desk based research)

• developing user personas;

• experience of working in a multidisciplinary agile development environment with service designers and others

• experience of training other user researchers.