GAIN Experience - Senior Interaction Designer in Bristol

Business Unit: GAIN Experience - We create user-centered experiences that drive measurable business impact for public and private sector organisations.

Team: Design

Reporting to: Director of Design

Location: Hybrid - offices in Bristol and London

About: GAIN is a creative-led, insight-driven company that blends data, tech and creativity. We believe the best ideas emerge where intelligence and creativity unite, where insight sparks imagination, and where innovation turns possibility into progress. We are explorers of new frontiers, shaping bold strategies that move people, brands, and businesses forward. Individually and together, our specialist teams provide the vision, data, and confidence brands and organisations need to make braver, more impactful decisions. Today as GAIN, we work as a united force, using data to fuel creativity, and technology to unlock new possibilities. As imagineers we don't just embrace innovation - we engineer it, transforming information into action, and ideas into breakthroughs. This is where rebel thinking, smart technology, and data-driven creativity shape the future.

Our Experience team has a strong and growing presence in the public sector, working with UK government departments and arm’s length bodies to design and deliver high-quality, accessible digital services. We work within GDS standards, Design System principles, and agile delivery frameworks to create services that genuinely work for the people who use them.

The Role: We're looking for a Senior UX Designer with a strong track record of working within UK government digital services to join our Experience team. This is a practitioner-level role aligned to the GDS Interaction Designer career framework. You'll be a skilled, confident designer who can lead complex interaction design work across agile delivery teams, helping government clients design and iterate services that meet the Digital Service Standard. You'll work collaboratively and openly with multidisciplinary delivery teams, user researchers, content designers, service designers, product owners, and engineers, playing an active, hands-on role throughout discovery, alpha, beta, and live service phases. You'll bring deep knowledge of the GOV.UK Design System, a rigorous commitment to accessibility and inclusion, and the ability to communicate design decisions clearly with technical and non-technical stakeholders.

As a senior practitioner, you'll also help to develop GAIN's public sector design practice, mentor mid-weight and junior designers, and contribute to bids and proposals for new government work. You'll bring a genuine curiosity about how AI, agentic tools, and emerging ways of working are reshaping the design and delivery landscape, contributing to how we evolve our practice, our design systems, and our ways of working to stay ahead of a rapidly changing field.

Interaction Design:

• Lead interaction design across complex government service projects, taking ownership from discovery and prototyping through to live service, in line with GDS phases and the Digital Service Standard.
• Design and iterate user flows, wireframes, screen designs, and high-fidelity prototypes using the GOV.UK Design System components, patterns, and guidance contributing back to the system when new patterns are needed.
• Create low and high-fidelity prototypes (using GOV.UK Prototype Kit or Figma) that can be used directly in user research sessions and presented to stakeholders.
• Apply interaction design best practices informed by GDS Interaction Designer role expectations, including understanding users' end-to-end journeys, designing for edge cases, and iterating based on evidence.
• Make design decisions based on user research findings, analytics, and accessibility audits, clearly documenting and communicating the rationale behind them.
• Design for the full range of users, including those with low digital literacy, limited English, or who rely on assistive technologies, embedding inclusion into the design process from the outset.

Accessibility and Inclusion:

• Champion accessibility across every stage of the design process, applying WCAG 2.1 AA (and where appropriate, 2.2 AA) standards as a baseline minimum.
• Conduct and contribute to accessibility audits of prototypes and live services, raising and tracking issues through the appropriate team processes.
• Design with an awareness of the breadth of users who interact with government services, including those using screen readers, magnification software, voice input, and other assistive technologies.
• Collaborate with researchers on inclusive research practice, ensuring representative and diverse research participation.
• Keep up to date with developments in accessible design, ARIA practices, and government accessibility guidance.

Agile Delivery:

• Work within agile delivery environments, contributing to sprint ceremonies, stand-ups, sprint planning, retrospectives, and design critiques as an active and engaged team member.
• Manage and prioritise your own design workload across sprint cycles, communicating progress, risks, and blockers clearly with product owners and delivery managers.
• Adapt design approaches to the pace and constraints of agile delivery, producing prototypes and design artefacts that are 'good enough to test' rather than 'perfect before sharing'.
• Support the team in defining and refining acceptance criteria for design-related stories, helping engineers understand interaction requirements clearly and accurately.

Collaboration and Communication:

• Work day-to-day within multidisciplinary teams alongside user researchers, content designers, service designers, product owners, and engineers as an equal contributor to a shared team mission.
• Participate in and facilitate design workshops, co-design sessions, and collaborative activities with team members and end users.
• Build strong, trusted relationships with government client stakeholders, presenting design work clearly, managing feedback constructively, and articulating the value of user-centred design.
• Contribute to internal GAIN design practice, knowledge-sharing sessions, and mentoring of less experienced team members.
• Support business development by contributing to proposals and presentations for new public sector opportunities.

Design Systems, AI and Evolving Practice:

• Actively contribute to the development and governance of design systems helping to define how components, patterns, and tokens are structured, documented, and maintained to serve both design and engineering teams effectively.
• Identify opportunities to improve design system tooling and workflows, including how design tokens, component libraries, and hand-off processes can better support the pace of agile delivery.
• Bring curiosity and critical thinking to how agentic AI tools are changing interaction design, exploring where AI-assisted prototyping, content generation, and automated testing can improve the quality and speed of user-centred delivery.
• Contribute to GAIN's evolving thinking on how AI fits into responsible, human-centred service design helping to shape our internal point of view, and applying that thinking critically and ethically on client projects.
• Stay at the leading edge of design and delivery best practice tracking developments in the GDS community, the wider design system ecosystem, and emerging AI tools, and bring well-considered perspectives back into the team.
• Share knowledge, run show-and-tells, and participate in practice development conversations that help the whole team grow in response to a fast-changing landscape.

Requirements:

Essential:

• Significant experience (typically 5+ years) in interaction design, UX design, or digital product design with a substantial portion of that experience spent working directly on UK central government or arm's length body digital services.
• Demonstrable experience working within the GDS delivery framework across discovery, alpha, beta, and/or live phases and designing services that meet the Digital Service Standard.
• Expert working knowledge of the GOV.UK Design System, GOV.UK Prototype Kit, and the underlying rationale for the patterns and components it contains.
• Deep, practical knowledge of WCAG 2.1 AA accessibility standards, and a portfolio that demonstrates accessible, inclusive design in action across government service contexts.
• Experience working within agile delivery teams, including familiarity with sprint ceremonies, backlog management, and designing iteratively within constrained timescales.
• Proven ability to work collaboratively and openly with user researchers, content designers, service designers, product owners, and developers taking direction from research, contributing to shared team decisions, and communicating design thinking clearly.
• Experience using Figma to design and document interaction patterns, flows, and component-based design work at high quality.
• A genuine curiosity about AI and agentic tools and how they are changing the way design teams work with the confidence to explore new approaches critically, ethically, and with the user always at the centre.
• Experience contributing to a design system, whether the GOV.UK Design System, a team-level component library, or an internal toolset, including documentation, governance, or pattern development.
• Strong facilitation and communication skills able to lead workshops, present design rationale to senior stakeholders, and navigate feedback with confidence and diplomatic skill.
• Ability to work on multiple complex projects simultaneously, managing your own time and priorities effectively in a fast-paced agency environment.

Desirable:

• Experience contributing to GOV.UK Design System community discussions, raising new patterns, or contributing components back to the wider community.
• Knowledge of the GDS Service Design career framework and experience collaborating closely with service designers on end-to-end service blueprinting.
• Understanding of government content design principles and the GDS writing style guide, enabling effective collaboration with content designers.
• Familiarity with front-end HTML, CSS, and Nunjucks templating within the GOV.UK Prototype Kit, enabling more complex or realistic prototypes.
• Experience designing for services used by citizens with particular needs, including those with complex health, financial, or housing circumstances.
• Exposure to service assessments and experience preparing design artefacts and evidence for alpha or beta assessments against the Digital Service Standard.
• Experience in other regulated or complex sectors (financial services, healthcare, education) where trust, compliance, and inclusion are equally critical.
• Hands-on experience with agentic AI tools, such as Copilot, Cursor, v0, or similar and a considered view on where they add genuine value in a user-centred design and delivery workflow.
• Familiarity with design token architecture, multi-brand design system management, or contribution workflows in large-scale or federated design system environments.
• Experience evaluating or integrating AI-generated content, interfaces, or processes into services in a way that preserves usability, accessibility, and user trust.
• Advanced prototyping skills using Framer, ProtoPie, or Principle for demonstrating sophisticated interaction behaviours beyond the GOV.UK Prototype Kit.

How You'll Work:

• Rebel Thinking: We don't accept 'good enough'. Rebel Thinking is about curiosity with courage. We make it safe to question assumptions, challenge the obvious, and explore smarter, braver ways forward, even when it feels uncomfortable. This is how new ideas, better products, and real breakthroughs happen.
• Make It Happen: 'We turn intent into momentum.' Making it Happen is about turning ambition into action. We move fast, learn fast, and push through obstacles together. Progress beats perfection, and momentum creates impact.
• Swarming Our Expertise: 'Individually smart. Collectively unstoppable.' Swarming our Expertise means we win together. We commit to developing our expertise so that by combining diverse skills, perspectives, and experiences, we solve harder problems faster and deliver results no single expert could achieve together.

Benefits:

• Private Medical Insurance
• Life Assurance
• Income protection
• Employee Assistance Programme
• Cycle to Work salary sacrifice scheme
• Tech & Wearables salary sacrifice scheme
• Octopus EV Scheme
• Discounts and deals on a range of items from hotels, holidays and hormone testing to cinema, gyms and will writing.

GAIN is an equal opportunities employer and positively encourages applications from suitably qualified and eligible candidates regardless of sex, race, disability, age, sexual orientation, gender reassignment, religion or belief, marital status, or pregnancy and maternity.