Senior Service Designer

Are you looking to make an impact? We are looking for a Senior Service Designer, who brings a systems and technical mindset to service and product design,  to support our client in the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA). In your work and through your design and technical expertise you will improve the lives for Veterans, Caregivers, Survivors and Family Members by reducing barriers to accessing care and benefits within the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA). If you have experience integrating HCD practices into the deployment and adoption of impactful, scalable digital services and enjoy simplifying complexity into intuitive experiences, we’d love to hear from you. A passion for our mission and civic design is a must-have.

In this position, you will be working in a small, cross-functional team of Researchers, Designers and Product Managers to understand and synthesize the frontend and backend experiences and systems to service customer needs, strategize how this information can serve a variety of employee use cases, and design innovative ways to share this knowledge for impactful adoption in the  VA.

How will you spend your time? 85% of your time will be spent on billable work, and roughly 15% of your time will be spent maturing our HCD practice at MO and mentoring more junior HCD team members.

Successful candidates will have a track-record of being present as a capability leader in high-performing design teams at scale. The willingness to dive into ambiguity and build new systems and processes, sometimes from scratch, is essential, as is leading through influence within a matrixed environment. Previous experience working in a client services organization (i.e., consulting or a digital agency) is helpful but not required. A passion for our mission and civic design is a must-have.

What You’ll Do

• • Project Leadership: Lead and oversee complex engagements, ensuring the seamless integration of Service  Design practices into overall project management. Contribute to shape program/project-level CX strategy, aligning user needs, business objectives, and technical capabilities to deliver exceptional user experiences.
  • Stakeholder and Client Management: Interact with internal and external stakeholders on UX design/HCD matters. Facilitate strategic conversations, instill enduring UX practices within customer organizations, influence high-level design decisions, and cultivate long-term partnerships based on trust and aligned objectives.
  • Discovery: Conduct thorough review of existing research outputs and technical documentation, sourced from various platforms (e.g., Slack, GitHub etc.), Map out frontend and backend experiences, including technical systems. Acknowledge the need to make informed assumptions in cases of knowledge gaps and collaborate with SMEs to review compiled questions and build on assumptions.
  • Prototyping, Testing, and Iteration: Iteratively integrate newly obtained information into diagrams and blueprints. Refine these, informed by specific user needs in diverse use cases for the information. Address challenges related to achieving the appropriate level of detail in blueprints and identifying the relevance of systems to the supported blueprint. Determine critical paths, assess whether systems need abstraction or decomposition, and prioritize areas where further investigation is needed.
  • Performance Metrics and Organizational Development: Collaborate with the team in creating and implementing strategies for  the adoption of data-driven frameworks and  evaluating the impact and effectiveness of design solutions, catalyzing innovation.
  • Mentorship and Design Leadership: Work with the Mo design team to build and mature a diverse and inclusive HCD Community of Practice with industry presence. Provide guidance and mentorship to more junior designers, fostering their growth and development within the team. Influence clients and stakeholders to embrace customer-centered design principles and practices.

What We Are Looking For

• • Design Mastery and Passion for Design for Change: 5+ yrs demonstrated expertise in human-centered design methodologies and practices contributing with technical expertise to complex digital service projects and navigating stakeholder relationships. Demonstrated commitment to social impact design.
  • People-centric Advocacy: Extensive experience as a people (customer/user) advocate, with a strong command of accessibility, Section 508 compliance, and a nuanced understanding of the challenges posed by user research barriers in the public sector.
  • Versatile Skill Set: Proficiency as a designer who can draw upon a breadth and depth of experience in at least five of the following capabilities: user research, information architecture, UX design, systems architecture, wireframing and prototyping, service design, usability testing and/or organizational change leadership.
  • Technical Command: Understanding of complex technical applications, capable of communicating and collaborating with the development team, interpreting and expanding on technical documentation and diagrams. Past experience in software development is nice to have.
  • Specialized Toolset: Experience using modern design and collaboration tools (such as Figma, Sketch, Adobe Creative Suite, Mural, and Miro), agile methodologies, and tool-sets such as GitHub/ZenHub to track user stories.
  • Consultative Mindset: Skilled in understanding client expectations, working as an agile team, managing and prioritizing multiple high-profile, medium-to-high complexity projects, and ensuring accountability in delivering against customer needs.
  • Cross-Disciplinary System Implementation: Experience working with cross-functional teams of product managers, developers, service designers, researchers, and UX designers to ensure the successful implementation and adoption of deliverables, maintaining consistency and accessibility across civic tech products.