Senior Service Designer

The Disclosure and Barring Service (DBS) helps employers make safer recruitment decisions each year by processing and issuing DBS checks for England, Wales, the Channel Islands, and the Isle of Man. DBS also maintains the Adults’ and Children’s Barred Lists and makes considered decisions as to whether an individual should be included on one or both lists and barred from engaging in regulated activity.

The User Centred Design (UCD) team is a key part of DBS Digital, which provides user-centred products and services that deliver vital government services enabling organisations in the public, private and voluntary sectors to make better informed, safer recruitment decisions.

DBS is looking for a Senior Service Designer who is passionate about delivering simple, accessible, and satisfying services, taking a leading role on projects to shape the approach and guide delivery.

You will be comfortable with ambiguity and complexity, passionate about design, and able to take the initiative with minimal direction.

As a strong influencer and designer, you will define what good looks like for the user, creating a clear and inspiring vision for success that can be communicated widely.

You are confident working at pace as part of a multidisciplinary team and are comfortable working across several services. You’ll be skilled at designing for both the front and backstage, designing the end-to-end journey of our services. You can use insight and data to inform your design decisions and measure service outcomes.

As a Senior Service Designer, you will lead on the design of two interconnected new services which are now in Private Beta.

Individuals cannot apply for a Standard or Enhanced DBS check by themselves. There must be a recruiting organisation who needs the applicant to get the check. This is then sent to DBS through a Registered Body (RB). The new Standard or Enhanced DBS check service will provide an accessible, digital route for RBs to submit individual and bulk applications as well as track their progress.

View and share your DBS online result provides applicants with the results of their Standard or Enhanced DBS checks. The service enables applicants to view their check online and share it with third parties.

Key Responsibilities.

Your responsibilities will include, but are not restricted to, the following:

• Lead and coordinate design across complex services ensuring services are outcome based and delivering against user needs and fulfil business outcomes.
• Work collaboratively in agile, multidisciplinary teams.
• Lead on the development of design concepts for services, leveraging common component design patterns from across government, iterating based on research and insights.
• You will ensure designs being produced meet the Service Standard and accessibility requirements.
• You will work closely with user researchers, content designers and performance analysts to test with users and iterate designs.
• Use your experience and delivery expertise to actively adapt ways of working to improve services, acting as the final escalation point for design decisions.
• Coach, support, and mentor others in what good design looks like.
• Promote and protect the value of good service design and ensuring that product teams can focus on delivering outcomes for users and the department.
• You will work with the wider user centred design team to raise awareness and visibility of what good design looks like.

Other:

• Help to define, develop, and embed standards, guidelines and processes that promote best practice and consistent ways of working across DBS.
• Build capability and assure quality to support strong outputs from multidisciplinary teams.

Essential criteria

You will already have demonstrable experience in:

• Leading the design of solutions that are based on evidence and help identify any gaps in knowledge.
• Aligning end-to-end user journeys across multiple products and services.
• Structuring and managing the design process, including framing problems and identifying measurable target outcomes.
• Facilitating engaging workshops to help multidisciplinary groups align, explore, ideate, prioritise or make decisions.
• Understanding complex systems and creating service visualisations to help others to navigate them.
• Developing sketches, diagrams and rapid prototypes to test ideas with users and stakeholders.
• Effectively communicating information and ideas using diagrams, prototypes and written narratives to influence stakeholders and decision-makers.
• Working autonomously, while managing multiple deadlines and responding to changing priorities.
• Engaging colleagues who are less familiar with service design or user-centred design

Desirable criteria

• Promote the importance of inclusive design and how to design with accessibility in mind.
• Experience of delivering services to the GOV.UK Service Manual and Service Standard.
• Coaching and mentoring to develop skills of team members.