Senior Designer Researcher

Designit; Greater London; On-site; GBP 60,000 - 90,000; Full time

Job summary

Designit in London is seeking an experienced Design Researcher with strong service design capabilities. You will take an emerging proposition through its next stage of development and validation, combining design research, proposition design, experimentation and service design.

You will work hands‑on across research, testing and end‑to‑end customer experiences, collaborating with product, design, technology, data and business stakeholders to move ideas forward in complex environments.

Qualifications

• Strong design research capability across qualitative methods and hypothesis-driven exploration.
• Ability to synthesize mixed evidence into clear findings and decisions.
• Experience shaping propositions from concept to real-world testing in complex services.

Responsibilities

• Lead design research activities to inform service design and product decisions.
• Design experiments and prototypes to validate hypotheses and gather evidence.
• Collaborate with product, design, technology and business stakeholders to advance propositions.

Skills

Design research

Qualitative research

Stakeholder collaboration

Service blueprinting

Journey mapping

Proposition design

Experimentation

Regulated environments

Job description

We’re looking for an experienced Design Researcher with strong Service Design capabilities to join an innovation venture and help take an emerging proposition through its next stage of development and validation.

You’ll pick up an established body of research, concepts and hypotheses, rapidly build an understanding of what has been learned so far, and design the next phase of research and experimentation. This is a hands‑on role spanning research, proposition design, experimentation and service design, working closely with product, design, technology, data and business stakeholders.

Essential skills & experience

Design research

• Strong qualitative research skills across depth interviews, contextual research, concept testing and evaluative research.
• Able to design research around specific hypotheses and assumptions, rather than simply exploring a topic.
• Experienced working with businesses or professional customers where needs, behaviours and decision‑making can be complex.
• Strong research synthesis skills, turning mixed and sometimes contradictory evidence into clear findings, implications and decisions.
• Experience moving propositions from concept into real‑world testing, ideally through prototypes, pilots, Wizard‑of‑Oz experiments or other lightweight validation methods.
• Able to identify the critical assumptions behind a proposition and design pragmatic experiments to test them.
• Comfortable combining qualitative and quantitative evidence to build or challenge conviction.
• Understands the difference between positive customer feedback and meaningful evidence of behaviour or value.
• Strong service‑design thinking, able to look beyond the interface to understand the end‑to‑end customer and service experience.
• Skilled in journey mapping, service blueprinting, proposition design and identifying where processes, people, data and technology need to come together.
• Able to translate research insight into tangible propositions, experiences and testable concepts.
• Comfortable working across front‑stage customer experience and the operational capabilities required behind it.

Complex / regulated environments

• Experience working on complex services, ideally within financial services, fintech, lending, B2B services or another regulated sector.
• Comfortable navigating constraints such as risk, regulation, credit, data and existing operational processes without allowing them to prematurely constrain innovation.
• Able to work effectively with subject‑matter experts while remaining a strong advocate for customer evidence.
• Experience working in conditions where the answer is not known in advance and the proposition is still evolving.
• Able to move between problem, proposition and validation, rather than treating research as a separate workstream.
• Comfortable inheriting work already in progress, challenging previous assumptions where necessary and maintaining momentum.
• Able to make sensible trade‑offs between rigour, speed and available evidence.