Lead Service/UX Designer

You’ll be part of a small, nimble design team, who helped to create highly-rated customer experiences – our iOS app has a 4.9 rating in the App store! You’ll work under the guidance of a highly-experienced UX manager, alongside fellow designers, UX researchers, product managers, and engineering teams.

Your UX Manager will offer near-constant coaching, for both your design and people skills.

You’ll work on the design of our service with a holistic view: for example, how should digital and retail function together?  You’ll work with leadership, stakeholders, designers, researchers and shop-floor staff to envision where we can improve the customer experience and what we need to change behind the scenes to make it happen.

Cross-channel experience
In the coming years, River Island will work towards creating seamless cross-channel experiences between our digital and physical stores – something that few fashion brands have the opportunity to do. You’ll spend time understanding customers, their goals, and pain-points, helping us to work out how the digital and physical experiences should work in harmony. You’ll map their experiences, helping others to understand the challenges faced by customers and the rich opportunities they present. From click-and-collect to finding items in store, or trying on clothes, you’ll design the experiences customers have at River Island.

Strategic collaboration
To make our customer experience live up to its potential, the traditionally separate areas of the business must collaborate around shared goals. Digital, retail, customer service, marketing, and more need to collaborate with your help to shape their shared experience strategy, differentiation, and prioritisation. You’ll spend time interviewing stakeholders, understanding strategy and customer pain points, and facilitating workshops to make key decisions that result in strategic alignment.

Ethnographic research
You’ll work with researchers, designers, and other colleagues to study how customers experience fashion, and the River Island experience in particular. You’ll spend time synthesizing existing research, planning new research, and observing customers, all in service of understanding the bigger picture.

Mapping and communicating the experience
You’ll help the entire organisation understand what kind of experience customers have with River Island through research, storytelling and mapping. You’ll help people understand how their work affects customers and help them decide what to do about it. Your communication and artefacts will help teams coalesce around shared understanding and shared goals. You’ll be able to craft easy-to-understand narratives that different audiences and stakeholders can understand.  You’ll be a champion for customers and better experiences.

Experimentation
You’ll shape and run service design experiments, both in-store and via digital channels. You’ll know how to test new ideas cheaply by simulating a new customer experience. You’re a keen observer of humans; you’ll quickly discern what’s working and what’s not, to increase the chances of launching successful initiatives.

How you’ll work
As a highly experienced practitioner in service design and strategy, you’ll be mostly autonomous; comfortable speaking to and engaging with the most senior stakeholders in the business. You’ll pair with other designers to work on customer insights and opportunities, facilitating better work through collaboration and critique. You’ll be an active contributor to the high-level roadmap and strategic planning; you’ll work closely with leadership on planning where teams should put their experimentation efforts.

You’ll be working often with stakeholders to understand their objectives and concerns – presenting them with both work and advocating for the opportunities you will identify.

River Island takes a lot of pride in our friendly, people-oriented culture. We have high expectations of your performance, but we’re a relaxed, convivial company; we like to keep it casual, caring and low-key. We’re that way after decades of working and growing together; our culture is stable in a way that younger organisations can’t match. You’ll enjoy working here; employees are exceptionally loyal to their teams and organisation.

Your competencies