Senior Service Designer

Discovery and prototyping role embedded in a small, experimental team Smart Heat, OVO Energy, London

OVO exists to power human progress with clean and affordable energy for everyone. Our user experience practice is growing and we’re seeking an experienced designer to join a new team investigating smart heat and home energy efficiency.

We want to decarbonise our customer’s home heating and are investing in new heating technologies to provide customers with greener alternatives. We need to identify, test, and develop novel ways to offer smart heat systems to customers, provide flexibility to the national grid, and promote the use of renewable energy to decarbonise our economy. This requires a radical transformation to an already complex energy system, as well as the service we offer our customers. It’s also never been done before.

You’ll be a generalist, happy to work on everything from mapping out our service blueprint and helping define our product strategy, to getting stuck in with interaction design—whether for prototypes, or working software we release. We’re running multiple hypothesis-based discoveries, so you’ll enjoy coordinating suitable collaboration activities. And you’ll be comfortable working across channels, with both online and offline touchpoints.

You’ll join a small team and work closely with our product manager and developers, as well as UX’ers in related teams. You’ll map and assess our customer journeys, pair with our user researchers to uncover customer needs, and facilitate workshops with colleagues and customers. We have lots of uncertainty as we uncover new things so you’ll enjoy moving quickly and responding to change, and value lightweight communication.

Our developers are based in Ukraine so you’ll have effective ways to collaborate on research and design together. Before COVID-19 we traveled to Lviv a few times a year to spend time with each other in person—we’ve stopped this until the whole team feels safe to start again.

You’ll be based in London and collaborate with people remotely. Learn more about working in the OVO family of companies at ovoenergy.com/careers and Glassdoor. We were delighted to receive a 2018 Top Employers certificate, and to be named uSwitch’s 2019 Supplier of the Year.

—————————————————————————————————————————————————————————

Diverse teams are the best teams. Only when we represent everyone, can we create services for everyone. We’re keen to meet people with varied backgrounds: the more inclusive we are the better our work will be. We understand some people may not apply to jobs unless they tick every box. And we know ‘normal’ office hours don’t work for everyone, so we’re open to discussing flexible working requests. If you’re excited about joining us and think you have much of what we’re looking for, even if you’re not 100% sure… we’d love to hear from you.

—————————————————————————————————————————————————————————

Your objectives

• • design and build services which help our customers understand and take charge of their home energy and carbon footprint — one of the biggest challenges in our industry
  • show how people choose to get new energy hardware installed in their homes
  • help the team validate or dismiss the assumptions they’ve had to make so far
  • work with marketing on how best to educate customers about new heating systems
  • use research and insights to continuously evolve our customer proposition and roadmap

You’ll define, shape, and help deliver solutions for our customers. And you’ll strive to ensure the user experience is consistent, human-centred, and delivers a best-in-industry service.

What You’ll Be Doing

First three months

• • immerse yourself in the energy industry, our market landscape, and how Kaluza works
  • meet our customers and learn how people live with different forms of home heating
  • get started straight away evolving and expanding our service blueprint
  • spend time with our operations teams to understand the offline parts of our experience
  • get to know your new team, and connect with our wider research and design community

Within six months

• • plan and lead workshops to bring people together and build shared understanding
  • pair with our researchers to establish interaction with customers and get fast feedback
  • show your team how a lean and iterative design approach helps them experiment quickly
  • observe our marketing and commercial teams at work, and build stakeholder relationships
  • pair with developers on design and reviews to ensure feasible and accessible solutions

You’ll love working with us if you…

• • have a passion for understanding real people’s real problems, and an ability to coach the people you work with not to jump to solutions too quickly
  • have a critical thinking process and enjoy studying problems to puzzle out the challenges
  • recognise assumptions (including your own) and seek ways to try and invalidate them
  • have a diverse and evolving toolbox of methods and techniques for visualising problems, services, and user journeys, as well as for developing and testing solutions are empathetic with colleagues as well as customers, especially when you’re communicating research findings, explaining the rationale behind a design, or challenging ways of working
  • know your strengths, and recognise there’s always more to learn from others
  • embrace iteration and are comfortable with ambiguity and change as we learn

UX at OVO means helping teams see their product through the eyes of real people— understanding their context, motivations, and needs—so we can improve things for everyone.

We use whatever methods and media best suit the challenge, and inform strategic choices about where improvements could have the greatest impact. We love design workshops, are getting people excited about service design, run UX critiques, and put participants at the centre of our research. We fall in love with the problem, not our solutions.

OVO believes in fueling human progress with clean and abundant energy for all. We were set up to challenge the status quo: to be the good ones, always find a way, and build something great. We embrace simplicity, transparency, and treating people and our planet fairly. We understand that attracting and keeping the best talent is key to our forward-thinking future, so our people will always share in our success. Our benefits are nice too.

We want to build teams which represent a variety of backgrounds, perspectives, and skills, and we hire on the basis of merit and potential. So get in touch, ask lots of questions.