Senior Service Designer

The Role

As a Senior Service Designer within BEIS Digital, you’ll support internal teams across BEIS to ensure that their service is user-centred. Your role will be to design accessible services that reduce friction and complexity across the whole service. You will work with senior stakeholders and customers to develop design concepts and support them by finding solutions to complex problems. As a Senior Service Designer you will also work with the Lead Service Designer to set direction and embed good practice within the team.

You’ll also be a mentor for junior members of the User Centred Design team and you’ll be able to work with minimal support and supervision.

Read more about BEIS Digital on https://beisdigital.blog.gov.uk/ and find us on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DkNdJJem13o. Join us on Wednesday 28th September at 5:30pm where we’ll give tips on how to write a successful job application. The session will cover CVs, Personal Statements, Success Profiles and the DDaT framework. Sign up via Eventbrite https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/414154997747

As a Senior Service Designer within BEIS Digital, you will

•            Understand user needs and identify where separate interactions within BEIS and across government.
•            Identify opportunities for cost reduction and improvement within an existing service.
•            Select and use appropriate design tools and methods to collaboratively explore service opportunities and problems and reduce unnecessary complexity.
•            Understand the existing supporting system of a service and design targeted improvements to that system to accommodate the new service – both digital and process based.
•            Create and rapidly iterate service prototypes.
•            Translate user needs into inclusive design concepts and prototypes.
•            Collaborate on designs with developers and other in multidisciplinary team.
•            Communicate design solutions effectively and influence key stakeholders of different design directions.
•            Explain design decisions and be able to represent a service at a service assessment

Skills & Experience

We want to hear from you if you have the following.

Essential Skills

You have:

• Relevant experience in designing services or user-centred digital tools

• Experience of working in an agile team

• The ability to work autonomously away from their team and at pace

• Experience of working with complex services and identify opportunities of how to remove complexity from services

• Experience of negotiating design decisions successfully with stakeholders

• Experience in leading workshops with non-technical colleagues and senior stakeholders

• The ability to identify the right medium to communicate within your team. For example: sketching, show-and-tells, paper prototyping, digital prototyping, non-digital prototyping or whiteboarding.

• Experience of explaining design ideas and concepts in a way that other people understand

• Experience in supporting user researchers to interpret findings and some experience in conducting basic user research yourself such as user interviews and usability testing

• Welcome the constructive criticism of your work and be able to constructively review the work of others

Please refer to the DDaT framework for more information about the skills needed for the role: https://www.gov.uk/guidance/service-designer#senior-service-design

Technical skills to be assessed at interview:

Agile Working – You can coach and lead teams in Agile and Lean practices, determining the right approach for the team to take and evaluating this through the life of a project. You can think of new and innovative ways of working to achieve the right outcomes. You can act as a recognised expert and advocate for the approaches, continuously reflecting and challenging the team

User Focus – You can give direction on which tools or methods to use. You can demonstrate experience in meeting the needs of users across a variety of channels. You can bring insight and expertise in how user needs have changed over time to ensure they’re met by the business. You can apply strategic thinking to provide the best service for the end user.

Communication – You can listen to the needs of technical and business stakeholders, and interpret them. You can effectively manage stakeholder expectations. You can manage active and reactive communication. You can support or host difficult discussions within the team or with diverse senior stakeholders.