Senior Service Designer

As a Senior Service Designer, you will create service experiences that are designed around the people that use them. This is a multidisciplinary design role where you’ll use the full range of your experience, exercising your skills in service design, research, digital strategy, and product design. You’ll collaborate with teammates and stakeholders to build services that are simple and easy-to-use for staff, residents, and businesses.

You will be a champion for user needs, improve business processes, streamline systems, and help cut bureaucratic red tape. You’ll work with other designers, product managers, and developers from across SF Digital Services to analyze services, map user experiences across channels (for both staff and the public), communicate ideas, and lead change management. You will work directly with City departments, and must have strong communication and relationship management skills.

In this role you will work on projects with city departments that may range from designing a smoother experience for opening a business in the City, to detangling the complex process to get permits for construction. You will work with Digital Services teammates to create frameworks and strategies that guide our own products and platforms, like affordable housing or the city website.  Your work will develop service patterns and best practices that can be applied across the city.

Responsibilities

Design

• Analyze and evaluate the constraints and possibilities of our complex systems and platforms
• Work co-creatively with partner department staff to develop and recommend design solutions that are both desirable and feasible
• Translate business requirements into user needs, and champion the (research-informed) resident experience to department staff and stakeholders
• Identify, document, and leverage repeatable service patterns across projects
• Coordinate digital services with printed materials and physical touchpoints to create seamless multi-channel services
• Create deliverables to express design solutions to the team and our partners, such as wireframes, service blueprints, screen designs, storyboards, user experience journey maps, and system maps

Strategy

• Facilitate the creation of aligned, strategic visions for department services
• Leverage the insights, patterns, and desires from partner department projects to inform the roadmaps and priorities of Digital Services’ platforms and products
• Analyze  how policies, interpersonal dynamics, history, and organizational structure impact service delivery
• Help partner departments navigate changing touchpoints, tools, and processes, determining the impact on current operations and how much change they can take on with each iteration
• Define what good service design looks like in San Francisco and help colleagues and stakeholders understand its value
• Identify new opportunities to improve systems and processes with technology

Research

• Lead the early stages of department projects, conducting discovery with staff to understand, document, and communicate the current process and its shortcomings
• Work with Digital Services’ Research to plan and conduct thoughtful and ethical user research with users, front line staff, and stakeholders
• Organize and facilitate workshops that bring together users and stakeholders to unpack a service’s challenges and propose new solutions
• Work with Digital Services’ Research to create long-term, user-centered strategies

1.  An associate degree in a digital design discipline from an accredited college or university OR its equivalent in terms of total course credits/units [i.e., at least sixty (60) semester or ninety (90) quarter credits/units with a minimum of twenty (20) semester or thirty (30) quarter credits/units in a closely-related field].

2.  Five (5) years of professional experience in digital design.

Substitution: Additional experience as described above may be substituted for the required degree on a year-for-year basis (up to a maximum of two (2) years). One (1) year is equivalent to thirty (30) semester units/ forty-five (45) quarter units with a minimum of 10 semester / 15 quarter units.

Desirable Qualifications

• Strong experience creating service design outputs including user journey maps, service architecture diagrams, systems maps, user profiles, and service blueprints
• Experience using a variety of methods to communicate findings and proposals, including presentations, prototypes, storyboards, and visual frameworks
• The ability to communicate the big picture to decision makers and the complex details to technical and subject matter experts
• The ability to work both tactically and strategically
• Strong facilitation skills, with experience in both planning and leading workshops
• Experience guiding change in business processes and systems
• Experience strategically incorporating research into the design process and familiarity with a variety of research methodologies
• Understanding of modern software product development
• Able to be practical and resourceful to remove blockers and get things done
• Enjoys the challenge of working with complexity and ambiguity
• Proactively seeks feedback, and constructively reviews the work of others
• Works openly and transparently – you must be prepared to show rough drafts
• Works comfortably in an iterative design process, adapting to changing deadlines and priorities