Service Designer

As a passionate Service Designer, you’ll be motivated to support and protect our communities by delivering better services.

Our teams work on projects that have a major impact on some of our country’s most critical systems and services. These projects often support major life events such as being born, getting married, or visiting another country. We also support more complex issues like exploring how people can get permission to come to the UK, or how refugees can be better supported to rebuild their lives.

In this role, you’ll look at the end to end experience of our services, to identify problems and reimagine how the service should work. You’ll look at both the front of house experience as well as the behind-the-scenes services, to help our staff delivering the services. And you’ll design with data and think about how to design it all in a way that makes it easier to change in future.

This role is within the Enablers Portfolio  where you’ll be supporting agile and user-centred design projects. You’ll be working with senior designers as part of a multi-disciplinary team and will help ensure that users are embedded at the heart of all our products and services.

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.

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/

Your main day to day responsibilities will be:

• Identify opportunities to improve the performance or management of existing services
• create compelling service solutions by drawing on multiple inputs, such as user research, operational insight, data patterns, organisational intent, or technical architecture
• Understand and appropriately balance the needs of users, providers and government when making design decisions
• Help develop the end-to-end view on projects, creating service visualisations to help teams understand, scope, and explore their work, and align effort towards a service vision
• Rapidly create sketches, diagrams, and lo-fi prototypes to share and test ideas

Essential Skills

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

• Mapping and analysing complex services to identify opportunities for improvement and set target measurable outcomes
• Working with the different elements of a service, including processes, people, and technology, to create designs that meet user needs
• Creating diagrams, visualisations and prototypes to communicate concepts
• Managing the design process and structuring work to align effort and build consensus
• Facilitating engaging workshops and working effectively with a wide range of stakeholders
• 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