Service Designer

Are you a creative, passionate individual looking to make a difference to the lives of others within the UK, through being part of a team who puts users at the heart of everything they do.This Service Designer role will allow you to become part of an evolving team who truly want to make a difference and add value within our newly formed branch of ‘Service Design & Innovation’.

The Office for National Statistics (ONS) is the UK’s largest producer of official statistics, covering a range of key economic, social and demographic topics. These include measuring changes in the value of the UK economy, estimating the size, geographic distribution and characteristics of the population, and providing indicators of price inflation, employment, earnings, crime and migration.

Whereas before COVID you might not have heard of the Office for National Statistics (ONS), chances are you have heard us mentioned numerous times a day in government briefings or as part of a news story. Our role is vital to the country to produce official statistics, which range from GDP, crime to deaths, births and marriages. These statistics underpin national and local decisions on numerous topics including migration, education and housing.

The role of a Service Designer is to be able to facilitate bringing to life the needs of a user and being able to tell a story of users relationships with ONS and how they changes over time. You are someone who isn’t product focused but can look at a problem holistically and bring that to life through co-creation of a design. You will take a true end to end, front to back view of a problem space, covering every touchpoint a user has on their journey whether developed by ONS or not.

Responsibilities

Core to being an effective Service Designer will be:
• To advocate for all users and ensure their needs are being met by the proposed service design;
• Able to effectively challenge people to ensure we are solution agnostic and strategic and that users are at the heart of our decisions;
• Able to take an evidence-based approach to your design thinking;
• To effectively run interactive, engaging remote workshops to be able to elicit information and walkthrough designs;
• To lead collaborative design activities, recognising that teams have different working styles so you will need to adapt to accommodate;
• Working closely with Enterprise Architects to deliver a holistic view and with teams across the organisation to minimise siloed working and recognise complementary skills.

Person Specification

Essential criteria:
• Communicator – essential skill to build relationships to enable you to influence others and get everyone onboard with a Service Design led approach. You need to be able to listen to people’s experiences, challenges and be able to ask the right questions to elicit that information from people;
• Empathic – Able to really listen, engage and understand users’ experiences. Be able to balance users’ needs and expectations with business constraints;
• Facilitator – Able to design and facilitate design sessions, taking into consideration the needs of the teams you are engaging with;
• System thinker – Be able to understand and analyse the journey in its entirety, how it interacts and integrates with other systems and services. You need to be able to visualise and understand the big picture as well as having the detailed view in your mind and be able to bring the two together;
• Synthesise – Being able to take evidence, information and artefacts and form theories, hypothesis and turn this into ideation. Able to take user pain points and use design thinking to turn those pain points into opportunities;
• Visualisation – able to clearly communicate the complexities of a problem through visualising the information in different ways depending on the audience. For example, creating service blueprints and user journey maps.

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

• Seeing the Big Picture
• Communicating and Influencing
• Making Effective Decisions
• Managing a Quality Service
• Working Together