Senior Service Designer - Remote & Flexible Public Sector

Version 1; Belfast City District; Hybrid; GBP 60,000 - 90,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Profit share

Pension 5% matched

Private healthcare

Gym discounts

Holiday entitlement 24 days

Job summary

Version 1 is seeking a Senior Service Designer to lead complex digital service design for a UK public sector client. You will guide discovery through live stages, map journeys and create artefacts with multidisciplinary teams, ensuring decisions are evidence-based and user-centred.

You will work within a GOV.UK Service Standard framework, balancing policy, technology and operations while championing accessibility and inclusion across all touchpoints.

Qualifications

• Strong experience as a Senior Service Designer within UK central government, wider public sector or another GDS-aligned environment.
• Practical experience designing services in line with the GOV.UK Service Standard and user-centred design principles.
• Experience working across one or more government delivery phases such as Discovery, Alpha, Beta or Live.
• Evidence of designing complex services end-to-end, and across multiple channels.
• Strong service mapping and visualisation skills, including service blueprints, user journeys and ecosystem/service maps.
• Experience translating user research and other evidence into service-design decisions.
• Strong workshop facilitation and co-design skills.
• Experience working with a broad range of stakeholders, including senior stakeholders, policy, operational and technical colleagues.
• Ability to navigate ambiguity, bring structure to complex problems and establish a clear service-design direction.
• Strong understanding of accessibility and inclusive design, including designing for users with different access needs.
• Ability to communicate and defend design decisions using clear evidence.
• Experience identifying measures or success criteria that can be used to understand service performance and impact.
• Experience using collaborative design and mapping tools such as Miro, Lucid or equivalent, with an understanding of Figma or similar prototyping tools.
• Experience preparing for or contributing to GOV.UK Service Standard assessments.
• Experience working on services involving complex policy, operational, data or technology dependencies.

Responsibilities

• Lead service design activity within an Agile multidisciplinary delivery team.
• Map as-is and to-be services, identifying pain points, dependencies, opportunities and gaps across the end-to-end journey.
• Create and maintain service blueprints, journey maps, service maps, ecosystem maps and other appropriate service-design artefacts.
• Understand the relationship between user-facing journeys and the processes, people, policy, data and technology that support them.
• Translate user research, analytics, operational insight and wider evidence into actionable service improvements.
• Work closely with user researchers to ensure service decisions are grounded in a strong understanding of user needs.
• Collaborate with interaction and content designers to create coherent experiences across digital and non-digital touchpoints.
• Work with product, business analysis, architecture, technology, policy and operational colleagues to understand constraints and design viable services.
• Plan and facilitate workshops, co-design sessions, service-mapping activities and collaborative decision-making.
• Prototype service concepts and test assumptions early, iterating designs based on evidence and feedback.
• Identify dependencies and systemic issues that may affect the successful delivery of the service.
• Communicate complex service journeys and design decisions clearly to senior stakeholders and multidisciplinary teams.
• Build consensus around service-design approaches while constructively challenging assumptions where necessary.
• Contribute to Service Standard assessments and assurance activity where required.
• Champion accessibility, inclusion and user-centred design throughout delivery.

Skills

Senior service designer

GOV.UK Service Standard

User-centred design

Workshop facilitation

Service mapping

Stakeholder management

Accessibility

Cross-functional collaboration

Evidence-based decision making

Miro

Lucid

Figma

Tools

Miro

Lucid

Figma

Job description

Version 1 is seeking a Senior Service Designer to lead complex digital service design for a UK public sector client. You will guide discovery through live stages, map journeys and create artefacts with multidisciplinary teams, ensuring decisions are evidence-based and user-centred.

You will work within a GOV.UK Service Standard framework, balancing policy, technology and operations while championing accessibility and inclusion across all touchpoints.