Service Designer

At ONS we are creative about the way we work to deliver brilliant and sustainable outcomes and as we collaborate, we approach working together with positivity and trust, investing in building excellent and inclusive working relationships across the organisation.

We operate a Hybrid working model. This means we offer greater flexibility about where and when we work. Our colleagues are linked to one of our core locations – Newport, London, Titchfield, Edinburgh (OSR) or Darlington where presence at one of these sites will form part of the working arrangements agreed during any offer made.

The office locations available for this role are set out at the top of this advert.

The role of a business 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 change over time.

This is not a Digital Service Designer role, so is not digital product focussed but you 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.

This is a challenging role working with sometimes complex problem spaces and you need to be able to take a step back and not delve into the detail. We work in a fast-paced environment and therefore you must be willing to adapt and deal with an ever-changing landscape. You will be expected to lead the design in that project and mentor and coach junior service designers in the team.

Responsibilities

Core to being an effective business service designer you will:
• Lead collaborative design activities, recognising that teams have different working styles so you will need to adapt to accommodate;
• Work closely with business and enterprise architects to deliver a holistic view and with teams across the organisation to minimise siloed working and recognise complementary skills;
• Be an advocate for all users and ensure their needs are being met by the proposed service design;
• Effectively challenge people to ensure we are solution agnostic and strategic and that users are at the heart of our decisions;
• Be able to take an evidence-based approach to your design thinking;
• Effectively run interactive, engaging remote workshops to be able to elicit information and walkthrough designs;
• Be able to carry out your own research to inform your designs;
• Be able to adapt your process to the timescales and business areas ways of working.

Person Specification
Essential criteria:
• Communicator – essential skill to build relationships to enable you to influence others and get everyone onboard with a business 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
• Managing a Quality Service
• Making Effective Decisions
• Working Together