Service Designer

Are you an experienced Service Designer looking for a new opportunity? Do you enjoy working closely with stakeholders to identify the most user centred solution? Then we have the role for you! Companies House has a well-established User Centred Design team within our DDaT directorate which includes a team of interaction designers, content designers, user researchers and performance analysts. Our services are critical for the UK economy and as an organisation we are committed to making them as user friendly and inclusive as possible.

We are looking for an experienced Service Designer to join the team who will lead on mapping our service flows and working with stakeholders to identify the most user centred solutions. The User-Centred Design (UCD) team sits within the Product Design Directorate, alongside the Product Management and Business Analysis teams. The UCD team is a community of 6 teams: Service Design, Interaction Design, Content Design, Accessibility, User Research, and Performance Analytics. Each team supports each other to review insights from our performance analytics and user research to understand user needs and co-design user-centred services. Our core values are empathy, collaboration and making working together fun! Our strategic objective is to innovate and ensure the organisation delivers services that work for everyone.

As our digital ambition is to move towards a service led organisation, we are currently in the process of mapping out the end-to-end user experience to move towards a simple and intuitive design that meets the needs of all our users and delivers the objectives of the Economic Crime Act. As a service designer, you’ll be an advocate of user needs and the GOV.UK Service Standard. This role will be critical in mapping the "as is" user experience, highlighting user pain points and exploring how we can solve the whole problem for users.

By bringing together key stakeholders, you’ll aim to ensure that there is a common understanding of our service design challenges for both digital and non-digital user journeys and engage with product, technical, policy, and communications teams to explore different solutions.

You will:

• Act as an advocate of user needs and service design, and influence the delivery of services to ensure that these user needs are met.
• Work with a multi-disciplinary team, including service managers, product managers, content designers, interaction designers, user researchers, performance analysts, and technical, policy and operational colleagues.
• Have responsibility for service design across complex services, ensuring services solve the whole problem for users and meet both user needs and policy intent.
• Lead on the development of design concepts for services, making best use of common component design patterns from across government, and iterating based on research, analytics and user feedback.
• Provide expertise to the team on accessibility requirements and inclusive design.
• Help identify high level needs and epics to influence the product roadmap and how the backlog is prioritised.
• Map the experience of users and highlight areas where it can be improved.
• Explore ways of simplifying complex end-to-end processes for digital and non-digital journeys.
• Identify design challenges and explore ways of solving them using best practice across government.
• Understand and work within constraints to deliver the most user-friendly solution to users.
• Promote the value of service design across the organisation.

We are looking for the following experience and skills which will be assessed at sift and interview:

• Experience of working in an agile environment with multidisciplinary teams.
• Experience of designing services for a wide range of users including novice users and users with assisted digital and accessibility needs.
• Ability to understand technical limitations and work within constraints to deliver the most user-friendly solution to users.
• Expert knowledge of the discipline of service design including mapping user experience and writing personas for multiple audiences.
• Experience of using different methods of telling the user stories.
• Experience of having difficult conversations with stakeholders and trying to influence their decision making based on user needs.
• Experience of leading and developing others and growing a community of practice.
• Ability to influence stakeholders and promote the value of user-centred design.
• Familiarity with GOV.UK accessibility regulations and inclusive design.
• Knowledge of the GOV.UK Service standard, GDS Design System, and the milestones of each delivery phase according to the Service Manual, or equivalent.
• An awareness of the GOV.UK Design system and the GOV.UK Style guide.

We'll assess you against these behaviours during the selection process:

• Communicating and Influencing
• Changing and Improving
• Delivering at Pace
• Developing Self and Others

We'll assess you against these technical skills during the selection process:

• Mapping of user needs and designing services to meet them.

Alongside your salary of 44,640, Companies House contributes 12,932 towards you being a member of the Civil Service Defined Benefit Pension scheme. We believe that our success is driven by the well-being and satisfaction of our team members at all levels of the organisation. At Companies House we’re committed to providing a comprehensive benefits package that goes beyond the ordinary, ensuring your career journey with us is not only fulfilling, but also rewarding. We pride ourselves on offering a quality work-life balance with our employee wellbeing being central to our working practices.

We celebrate diversity... As an equal opportunity employer, we celebrate diversity, being committed to ensuring we’re representative of the citizens we serve and creating an inclusive environment. Everyone in Companies House brings something different, and so will you. To fulfil our commitment to recruiting and attracting diverse talent we welcome applications from underrepresented groups. We also welcome applications from Welsh speakers. We are proud to be a disability confident leader. Our recruitment process is fully inclusive and we can make adjustments as needed through our process.

Where will you be working? You will be based at either our Cardiff or Edinburgh office and will be expected to attend your chosen location on a regular basis. As part of the application process, you will be asked to select your preferred location from those advertised. Please be aware that this role can only be worked in the UK and not overseas.

We are currently using a hybrid approach to the way we work which provides opportunities for you to be adaptable in the way you work so that you can achieve a healthy balance between your work and home life.