Senior Service Designer

As the Senior Service Designer you will lead design across a range of products and services playing a key role in the transformation of the Valuation Office Agency (VOA) to a digital, user focused organisation.

You’ll work in a multidisciplinary team, alongside policy experts, user researchers, designers, product managers and technology experts, to develop integrated user-centred public services. You’ll be part of our active and supportive design community in VOA, HMRC and across government.

You must have a collaborative approach and a passion to communicate effectively. You will take accountability and ownership and have the ability to coach, mentor, reflect and to give and receive feedback. You will be flexible and adaptable, working with a sense of urgency and be passionate about having ‘The Customer’ at the heart of what you do.

Responsibilities

• provide leadership to drive user-centred service design based on insight and evidence
• identify future service opportunities and propositions that meet user needs and deliver on government intentions, communicating the rationale and potential benefits of those propositions
• lead teams and stakeholders to develop service propositions into designs
• understanding how policy and organisational intents align to user needs
• help to plan user research and collaboratively analysing and synthesising the results of user research
• analysing failure within existing services, identifying root causes for that failure and creating recommendations to address that failure
• mapping current service journeys and creating blueprints for improved and/or new services
• understanding the existing support system for a service – both digital and process based – and designing targeted improvements to existing services or to accommodate new services,
• mentoring and coaching within the design community, line managing more junior designers, and participating in HMRC’s design profession and cross-government design and policy communities

Essential criteria:

• experience of using design in the development of strategy, including the evaluation of strategies and policies to ensure that user needs and business requirements are being met
• significant experience of planning service design
• experience of planning and running workshops with stakeholders, end users and/or front-line service providers
• experience of leading the analysis and synthesis of outputs from workshops and other research/design activity, for instance, user journeys and service flows
• experience of preparing and communicating design outputs, for example: service maps/blueprints and design presentations
• a solid understanding of user research practice, experience in using metrics and user feedback to define/refine services and the ability to work collaboratively with user researchers and interpret research findings
• experience using a variety of methods for prototyping and iterating products and/or services, including the end-to-end service context
• an understanding of new and emerging technologies and a basic understanding of digital delivery platforms and digital prototyping approaches
• experience of working collaboratively and effectively with multidisciplinary teams at pace

Desirable criteria:

• Experience working in Agile teams
• Designing within a policy context