Service Designer

Job description

The Programme Service Designer is an expert practitioner with broad industry experience, who can define and assure best practice whilst influencing, leading, and mentoring others.

As Programme Service Designer for Defra’s Future Farming and Countryside program, your role will be to help Defra design and deliver joined-up, end to end services.

You will be excited by the challenge of understanding user needs and policy goals to support strategy and decision making, and experienced at visualising whole services – both end to end and front to back, across business areas and government departments, in order to reduce or remove issues and problems.

Responsibilities

• Leads discussions at senior departmental level and negotiate change to support the delivery of better end to end services

• Prioritises understanding needs and behaviour of users and using this insight to underpin the services the organisation designs

• Sets standards for service design quality, output, and impact

• Leads a community of service designers across the programme providing performance feedback and supporting their learning and development goals

• Ensures teams design services accessible to a full range of users, including those with access needs

• Design in a user-centered way, understand user needs, and advocate for people

• Use evidence from research and data to inform design and management decisions, and to engage with senior stakeholders

• Design collaboratively and in the open, engaging stakeholders in the design process in a variety of ways, including workshops, design sprints, and other co-design methods

Skills and Experience

The right person will have a demonstrable passion for user-centered design, with:

• Designing services for users in large, complex organisations, tracking interactions across departmental and organisational boundaries

• Engaging with stakeholders and colleagues from other disciplines in a variety of ways, as well as the ability to work autonomously away from their team

• Working with senior stakeholders, negotiating design decisions and helping to guide direction for teams, programmes and organisations

• Making effective decisions using user research and data, in order to improve a service, reduce complexity and generate new ideas

• Designing the interactions and building blocks that make up a service, create service prototypes to test ideas and assumptions

• Reflecting critically and asking difficult questions; thinking holistically about the big picture while working out details and being able to appreciate and articulate the broader implications of a thing