Senior Service Designer

As a skilled Senior Service Designer, you’ll be motivated to support and protect our communities by delivering better services to people living in the UK and beyond.

Our projects support major life events such as getting married or visiting another country. Or more complex issues like exploring how the police can better protect vulnerable members of our community, or how refugees can be better supported to rebuild their lives.

You’ll be passionate about delivering simple, accessible, and satisfying services, taking a leading role on projects to shape the approach and guide delivery. You are able to work at pace as part of a multi-disciplinary team and are comfortable working across several smaller services or on one larger programme of work. You’ll be skilled at designing for both the front stage and behind the scenes and use data to inform your design decisions and measure service outcomes.

This role is within the Enablers Team where you’ll be supporting agile and user-centred design projects. You’ll work to ensure that users are embedded at the heart of all our services and transform how the organisation works.

Enablers vision is to provide outstanding products and services for internal users across the Home Office.  We provide large, complex and business critical services to over 40,000 staff members.  We also support smaller, specialist teams to deliver on legislative requirements.  The work is fast paced and varied. You’ll be joining a team of over forty user centred design professionals.

You’ll also look after junior staff through line management, mentoring, or training, as well as participating in recruitment activities.

The first duty of the government is to keep citizens safe and the country secure. The Home Office has been at the front line of this effort since 1782. As such, we play a fundamental role in maintaining the security and economic prosperity of the UK.

The Home Office leads on immigration and passports, refugee protection, counter-terrorism, policing, fire services, and crime and drugs policy.

Digital Data and Technology (DDaT) enables the Home Office to keep the UK safe and secure. We design and build the services that help people apply for visas or passports; support policing and counter-terrorism operations; and protect the UK’s borders.

This is an exciting time to be at the Home Office. You’ll have a chance to shape the future and support our mission to deliver exceptional public services that work for everyone.

Our work is guided by these principles:

• we put user needs first
• we value delivery and outcomes over process
• we work in the open

Our flexible working policy ensures a healthy work-life balance. We also nurture talent and offer a broad range of learning and development opportunities that will help you flourish in your role.

We work hard to maintain a positive working culture and are committed to helping you fulfil your potential. We value diversity and provide an open, inclusive and supportive environment to help you do your best work.

You can keep up-to-date with our work on the [Home Office DDaT blog.](https://hodigital.blog.gov.uk/)

Responsibilities

Your main day to day responsibilities will be:

• Lead service design work on projects and ensure that delivery teams are taking a user-centred, evidence-based approach
• Create compelling service solutions by identifying opportunities to improve the performance or management of existing services, and drawing on findings from user research, data patterns, policy and operational intent and technical architecture.
• Engage with senior stakeholders, presenting project findings and related recommendations to senior decision makers across government.
• Rapidly create sketches, diagrams and lo-fi prototypes to share and test ideas
• Coach and co-ordinate multidisciplinary teams to help them successfully design good services
• Raise awareness of what good service design looks like by sharing valuable case studies, methods, tools, artefacts and standards across the Home Office and to the wider community​

You will also be expected to carry out the following day to day activities:

• present project findings and related recommendations to senior decision makers across government
• identify and raise any blockers to design activities to the leadership team

Essential Skills

You’ll have a demonstrable passion for user-centred design, with the following skills or strong experience in:

• analysing complex systems and services, to identify opportunities for cost reduction and improvement
• designing and implementing services across people, process, and technology, front stage and back stage to ensure that user needs and target outcomes are being met
• structuring and managing the design process, framing problems and identifying measurable target outcomes to minimise ambiguity and align effort
• effectively communicating complex information and ideas through diagrams, visualisations and written narratives
• engaging with stakeholders at all levels, advocating for user centred ways of working and managing expectations as needed
• considering the needs of diverse audiences to design accessible and inclusive services

Our skills align with the cross gov DDaT Capability Framework ​​

Digital, Data and Technology Profession Capability Framework – GOV.UK (www.gov.uk)​

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

• analysis of complex systems and services
• designing to meet user needs
• measuring outcomes
• communicating complex ideas creatively and effectively
• designing for accessibility and inclusion