Service Designer

This Role

The Service Designer at Smart Columbus plays a critical role in ensuring residents have a more frictionless experience with infrastructure, systems, and services, increasing access to opportunity and improving quality of life by leading the design, prototyping, testing, and evaluation of projects across programs with a human-centered approach. This position focuses on design research, an understanding of user experience design, and the facilitation of design methods to promote cross-functional alignment and inform decision-making. You will serve as the voice of the end user, making sure their needs are considered and met within any proposed solution. You will co-create solutions with the community to improve the success of program, service, and technology implementations and work with multifunctional teams to translate ideas into tangible prototypes.

You

You are a thought leader that guides, influences and shapes a human-centered way of working throughout the organization which will ultimately lead to community impact. Your work will range from designing a digital skills pilot and mapping complex interconnected digital inclusion initiatives to testing out new applications for emerging urban technologies. You will work with teammates to create frameworks and strategies that guide our projects. Your work will develop best practices that can elevate Smart Columbus as a leader in human-centered urban technology and service deployments co-created with the community.

This is a leadership role driving design strategy and execution that will include research, community co-design, experience strategy, and visual design. Key to your success will be a positive spirit, the ability to foster relationships with community partners, and a relentless commitment to driving equity and prosperity throughout the Columbus region. You will be looked to as a trusted partner and problem solver, helping all stakeholders overcome obstacles and guiding solutions forward through service design.

Reports to

Director of Operations

Essential Duties and Responsibilities:

• Plan and implement service design methods and approaches for projects across Smart Columbus’s portfolio of work to ensure continuous feedback and learning, facilitate team collaboration and co-creation workshops, and creation of service design outputs and deliverables to shape and deliver design concepts.
• Provide assistance in designing and executing research plans, encompassing pilot research, data collection, and analysis, to yield insights for program development.
• Understand and effectively communicate the user experience, guiding decisions on pilots, platform features, processes, and change management.
• Design and execute surveys, stakeholder interviews, and other research methods to refine product features and functions, aligning them with user needs.
• Create journey maps, service blueprints, personas, ecosystem, and experience maps that articulate actionable recommendations and foster user-centric program and platform development.
• Maintain communication with research participants, ensuring informed consent, continued participation, and appropriate incentives, when applicable, to support the research process.
• Demonstrate comfort and effectiveness in engaging with the community, fostering collaborative partnerships and insights.
• Apply an iterative, human-centered design process and lens to help the community solve complex problems through strategic planning, process improvement, technology adoption and evolution, and program/service delivery.
• Facilitate discovery and innovation workshops for a range of stakeholders including government audiences, community leaders, internal staff, and residents using human-centered methods, tools, and best practices.
• Synthesize research and data and craft compelling stories to communicate insights that will shape service and technology innovations.
• Demonstrate how user research should be integrated into developing technology and new ways of working.
• Craft compelling stories and visual models to communicate insights and discoveries with stakeholders and decision-makers in compelling ways using a variety of visual mediums.
• Experience collaborating within a multi-disciplinary delivery team including other designers, technologists, data scientists, engineers, project managers, and change managers.

Skills and Qualifications:

• Bachelor’s degree in Service Design, Human-Centered Design, User Experience (UX), Research, or a related field (Master’s preferred).
• 5+ years of professional work experience as a service designer, UX designer, human-centered designer or similar.
• Proficiency in conducting surveys, interviews, and other user research methods.
• Strong data analysis and synthesis skills to translate research findings into actionable insights.
• Ability to create user archetypes, user journeys, and service design artifacts.
• Strong facilitation skills, with experience in both planning and leading workshops.
• Exceptional communication and interpersonal skills for engaging with research participants and cross-functional teams.
• Ethical research practices and the ability to ensure informed consent and participant satisfaction.
• Community engagement experience, particularly in collaborative settings.
• Bilingual or multilingual candidates are a plus.
• Able to be practical and resourceful to remove blockers and get things done.
• Positive, adaptable mindset and thrives in a dynamic, fast-paced environment.
• Passionate about solving problems and improving quality of life in the community.
• Personal commitment to advancing in the areas of diversity, equity and inclusion.
• Champion of the future and what’s possible, even if it’s never been done before.