The Service and Interaction Design Lead plays a pivotal role within the User-Centred Design team in the Digital Directorate. This is a senior, expert practitioner position, responsible for providing professional leadership and ensuring that the most effective service and interaction design decisions are made to meet the needs of service users.
In this role, you will lead and develop the organisation’s design community, demonstrating a wide range of leadership and management skills, and fostering a supportive, collaborative environment to help shape the HRA’s journey in delivering high-quality digital services for the research community. Working closely with the Head of User-Centred Design and product teams, you will contribute to strategic planning through service design, ensuring that all work is grounded in a user-centred, evidence-based approach to design and delivery.
You will also play a key role in assessing the impact of emerging technologies, ensuring that design solutions comply with legal requirements, accessibility standards, and government guidelines. Your responsibilities will include applying core service design techniques such as blueprinting, prototyping, user journey mapping, and storyboarding to create intuitive and effective services.
In addition, you will champion and clearly communicate the importance of inclusive, equitable, accessible and sustainable public services across the organisation.
Main duties of the job
- Demonstrate excellent communication skills, influencing across multiple groups of people including suppliers, external partners, and senior internal stakeholders, you will form a deep understanding of user and organisational needs.
- Lead internal and external activities within the design specialism to develop and convey complex concepts.
- Engage with stakeholders to facilitate and foster collaborative approaches to prioritising service and interaction design requirements of users and partners.
- Lead a proactive approach to our alignment with the Government Service Standard and work with user centred design colleagues to constantly improve the design of our services.
- Work collaboratively with the Head of User Centred Design and the product team to guide both design and organisational strategy and priorities.
- Using expert knowledge and previous experience to advise on design standards, methods, tools and applications, so that optimum approaches and solutions are delivered to meet user needs, organisational objectives and policy intent.
- Analyse and interpret functional and non-functional design requirements to ensure the overall needs of the business are met from a digital perspective.
Organisational structure and directorate overview
The HRA is made up of five directorates: Approvals, Chief Executive, Digital, Policy and Partnerships and Resources.
This role sits within HRA Digital. The digital directorate is responsible for developing, delivering and supporting complex solutions within the HRAs portfolio of UK-wide information systems for health and care research. This includes a major programme to build new systems, and to achieve the successful migration and eventual closure of current systems. The directorate owns, develops, and delivers the HRAs digital strategy in line with government digital and functional standards.
Person Specification
Qualifications
- Master’s Degree or post-graduate qualification in a relevant area or significant relevant experience in service and interaction design
Knowledge, Skills and Expertise
- In depth specialist knowledge and significant experience of developing service designs based on evidence of user needs and organisational outcome.
- Expert interaction design practitioner with experience of influencing and mentoring others.
- Set direction and assure best practice by determining and documenting design standards and policies.
- Thorough knowledge of user centred design and product development process.
- Confident in providing advice and guidance across projects on service design and interaction design to influence others, in line with the Government Service Standard.
- Knowledge and expertise in blue‑printing, prototyping, user journey flows and story‑boarding techniques, including giving direction on tools and methods to use.
- Significant experience in combining user research and analytics to problem solve through design iterations to improve user experience.
- Understand and communicate the importance of inclusive, equitable, accessible and sustainable public services.
- Able to have an overall perspective on business issues and activities, understand their wider implications and long‑term impact.
- Evaluate design proposals from external suppliers, and make recommendations to senior stakeholders.
- Working across multiple services and leading groups of UCD professionals to set direction, assuring the quality of service and interaction design.
- Interpreting strategy and translating emerging trends and technologies which might impact or benefit the organisation.
- Champion accessibility and inclusion, consider the impact of new technologies and ensure that designs meet legal requirements.
- Coaching and leading teams in user centred design principles.
- Influence and manage in a complex matrix department.
- Supporting the design team to maintain a focus on delivery whilst instilling the importance of professional development and continual learning.
- Facilitating conflict resolution within teams or professions.
- Multi‑tasking, analysing opportunities, defining successful approaches, and proactively solving problems.
Experience
- Onboarding of new staff within a user centred design team or professional community.
- Identifying design needs, creating new design patterns and components where needed and ensuring they are captured and implemented as part of a project and across the government design system.
- Experience of successfully leading a design team through GDS/CDDO or NHS Service Standard assessments.
- Past experience working in government or an NHS Organisation.
- Designing clear, usable, accessible digital interfaces that are inclusive and work across a range of devices.
- Demonstrable experience of managing service and interaction design as a lead or as part of a user centred design team to iterate design processes.
- Work effectively in a multidisciplinary, agile environment, adapting quickly to changes in requirements, priorities or user needs.
Analytical and Judgemental Skills
- Able to have an overall perspective on business issues and activities, understand their wider implications and long‑term impact.
- Evaluate design proposals from external suppliers, and make recommendations to senior stakeholders.
- Working across multiple services and leading groups of UCD professionals to set direction, assuring the quality of service and interaction design.
- Interpreting strategy and translate emerging trends and technologies which might impact or benefit the organisation.
Interpersonal Skills
- Engaging and building relationships with a range of stakeholders to support delivery of user and business needs.
- Coaching and leading teams in user centred design principles.
- Influence and manage in a complex matrix department.
- Supporting the design team to maintain a focus on delivery whilst instilling the importance of professional development and continual learning.
- Facilitating conflict resolution within teams or professions.
Diversity and inclusion
We welcome applications which represent the rich diversity of our community: age, disability, gender identity and expression, ethnicity, religion or belief, sex, sexual orientation and other diverse characteristics, and we have policies in place to ensure that all applicants are treated fairly and consistently at every stage of the recruitment process.
Benefits
Full-time, Flexible working, Home or remote working, Compressed hours
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