Senior Service Designer in Edinburgh

We're looking for a Senior Service Designer to take an end-to-end view of our service journeys, ensuring they flow seamlessly. This will help us deliver effortless digital experiences, build on customer satisfaction, and advance the practice of Service Design across RoS. In this role you'll lead design concepts, take ownership of shaping complex services, embed best practices within multi-disciplinary teams, and make informed decisions grounded in research—while mentoring and influencing others.

This is an opportunity for an experienced service designer to create meaningful impact, drive positive change, and influence how our services are shaped and delivered.

On a typical day you will:

• Provide expert knowledge of service design practices and methodologies at a senior practitioner level and support the delivery of detailed visual customer journey flows across various RoS services.
• Visualise end-to-end services with front and backstage processes in line with user needs and business requirements.
• Facilitate workshops to validate and refine the journeys with key customers, colleagues and stakeholders.
• Gather quantitative and qualitative data to inform the journey mapping, ensuring we understand the experience and pain points for the customer.
• Redesign services and/or embed new services focusing on 'What matters to the customer.
• Share understanding of approach to service design and maturity and how this supports the Scottish Government approach.
• Help to embed Service design thinking into the service area and provide the skills to continue them into the wider business.
• Engage in any stage of the service lifecycle as required.
• Actively contribute to the design community by sharing knowledge, generating ideas, and embedding design principles.
• Be confident in engaging stakeholders and working with established governance forums such as the Service Alignment Team (SAT).
• Facilitate co-design with colleagues in the business areas to produce improvements for services.
• Implement improvements across small groups to monitor and assess risk and impact before implementing on a larger scale.
• Collaborate with other User Centred Design resources, when required, on overlapping deliveries.
• Support any secondary activities as requested by the Principal Designer or Service Design Lead.
• Simplify complex ideas, visualise solutions, and adapt to uncertainty while working within organisational constraints.
• Remain calm and resilient under pressure, proactively spotting risks and responding to changing priorities.

Key Responsibilities

Essential Criteria – Skills and Attributes for Success

Technical Experience

• Experience delivering end-to-end service design across digital and offline channels, normally evidenced by at least two years in a similar role.
• Proven track record of influencing teams, mentoring others, and embedding good design practices.
• Experience making informed design decisions based on research, user insights, and organisational goals.

Behaviours

At application stage, you will be scored against the bolded Behaviours at application and against all for the assessment:

• Working Together: able to listen to the needs of the technical and business stakeholders, and interpret between them; able to manage stakeholder expectations and be flexible; capable of proactive and reactive communication; facilitates difficult discussions within the team or with diverse senior stakeholders; advise others how to effectively plan and run design sessions with a team, users or stakeholders; adapt a design session to ensure you achieve a useful outcome; effectively involve the right people throughout the design process; work across team or profession boundaries, for example with policy teams.
• Leadership, Communication and Influencing: works with higher impact or more complex risks; builds consensus between services or independent stakeholders; leads others to make good design decisions; mentoring others, through pairing & role modelling; shares best practice and can coach others; devise teams on how to design inclusive, accessible and environmentally sustainable content or services; design and deliver ethical content or services that consider the personal and social context of users; ensure a design meets appropriate standards, for example accessibility regulation.
• Seeing the Big Picture: identify and understand constraints across the business or service and is able to communicate these and work within them; able to challenge the validity of constraints ensuring RoS standards are being met; provide direction on which tools and methods to use by using experience to meet the needs of users across a variety of channels; help a team understand how user-centred design helps it meet its goals; help teams align their work to the goals and vision of their organisation; use risks, opportunities and constraints in technology, systems and policy to shape design.