Senior Service Designer

As a Senior Service Designer, you will be responsible for end-to-end design thinking to help us with our mission to build user-centred services, accessible for everyone. You will work in multidisciplinary teams, alongside user researchers, developers, data analysts, policy experts and others to deliver excellent, user-centred public and behind-the-scenes services. You will identify opportunities and gaps for end users and the organisation across all touchpoints within both digital and non-digital services, to help users complete tasks without friction.

We work on really important services that reduce workload and stress for teachers, make sure children in care get the best opportunities in life and help adults get the skills they need for the future economy. We’re also helping our teams deliver more effectively by designing and reinventing our internal services.

You’ll be working with people who value user research and design and you’ll be creating work you’ll feel proud of.

We’re creating a great place to work by offering:

• An environment with flexible working options including flexi-time with no core hours.
• Learning and development tailored to your role and a personal learning and development budget.
• A culture encouraging inclusion and diversity.
• An employer pension contribution of up to 27%.
• A generous annual leave allowance up to 30 days after 5 years of service.
• Modern and effective collaboration tools.
• A wide variety of staff support networks including a Women’s Network, BAME Network, Wellbeing Network and many more.

It’s important to us that we recruit from a wide range of professional and personal backgrounds – bringing different perspectives, diversity of thought and experiences to our work. If you would like to know more about our commitment to making DfE more equitable, please read our blog. Further information about our benefits package can also be found here!.

As a Senior Service Designer you will :

• Be part of the user-centred design team and DfE’s growing design community of practice.
• Have experience of advocating for user needs in all aspects of design work; experience of user-centered design and creating joined up services.
• Lead the design of services across teams and support the wider organisational objectives and strategic priorities.
• Understand the existing system of your service and work with teams to target improvements and cost reductions.
• Know how to design inclusive, accessible digital services that solve a whole problem for users.
• Capture, document and present holistic experiences in a clear, engaging way.
• Work with stakeholders and senior leaders to create the service vision and build a roadmap to deliver outcomes.
• Lead discussions at a senior departmental level and successfully negotiate change to support the delivery of better services.
• Communicate effectively to share the as-is and the future vision of the service, working closely with service owners to help define the backlog.
• Help people and teams overcome complexity, running and synthesising workshops to create clarity, alignment and direction.
• Analyse failure within services and identify root causes for failure.
• Actively promote the design perspective in discussions with teams and stakeholders.
• Map end-to-end services and understand how they fit into wider societal, service, system and organisational contexts.
• Create and rapidly iterate both digital and non-digital service prototypes.
• Coach, mentor and train other designers, helping set and communicate good practice to improve quality and consistency across DfE’s transformation programmes.

Responsibilities

Essential skills and expertise for this role are:

• Evidence- and context-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.

• Leadership and guidance. You can change organisational structures to fixable and sustainable designs. You know how to lead on the strategy for the whole organisation, marrying business needs with innovative analysis. You can make and justify decisions characterised by high levels of risk, impact and complexity. You know how to build consensus between organisations (private or public) or highly independent and diverse stakeholders. You can solve and unblock issues between teams or departments at the highest level. You understand the psychology of a team and have strong mediation skills.

• User focus. 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’ll have significant experience collaborating with teams and stakeholders to help define the problem that needs to be solved. You can bring insight and expertise in how user needs have changed over time to ensure these are met by the business.

• Facilitation. You’re confident using facilitation and co-design approaches and service design methodologies to bring users, stakeholders, and individuals together to frame problems, agree on shared purpose and shape a design process to deliver desired service outcomes.

• Prototyping. You are experienced in using a variety of methods of prototyping your vision and engaging others with how the world could be. 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 involve your team, stakeholders and users and build feedback and validation into your ways of working.