About the job

Job summary

HM Land Registry's services form part of the critical national infrastructure, safeguarding land and property ownership valued at £7 trillion. This enables over £1 trillion worth of personal and commercial lending to be secured against property across England and Wales.

It is an exciting time for HM Land Registry as we continue on a major transformation programme. HMLR's ambition is to become the world’s leading land registry for speed, simplicity and an open approach to data.

We are looking for a Senior interaction designer to join our Design practice. You will design accessible, easy-to-use public services that work across multiple channels, devices, browsers, and platforms.

Job description

As a Senior Interaction Designer, you will:

• manage and direct interaction design solutions as part of several multidisciplinary agile teams, delivering new and existing services that meet user needs and HM Land Registry policy objectives
• manage a backlog of project design work for designers to work on in agile teams
• analyse and interpret user needs and business objectives in highly complex service areas to make expert decisions that balance the needs and outcomes of both parties
• challenge ways of working within the team that are not compatible with user centred design best practice and legacy, paper-era processes where user research suggests a more user-focused way to achieve business outcomes and policy intent
• develop and recommend design concepts that help re-imagine how services can be delivered end-to-end and identify potential areas of improvement
• work with user researchers, business analysts and developers to turn concepts into user-centred services
• run design workshops and design sprints with the team, senior stakeholders and users
• create and rapidly iterate low and high-fidelity prototypes to test and communicate ideas with users
• contribute to our design system; develop and maintain design standards and a pattern library, ensuring patterns and components are consistent, accessible, and easy to use across our digital products and services
• work with the wider project team to ensure that services meet the digital service standard, participating in services assessments as necessary to provide interaction design evidence to support the relevant points
• develop, coach and manage other designers in the practice
• present and deliver the team’s and your own work within your agile team, and at community critique and feedback sessions
• collaborate with designers across government to identify and design scalable, cross-government design patterns and standards

Being a designer at HM Land Registry

Supporting your learning and career progression is important to us. ​

As a designer at HM Land Registry (HMLR), you will have access to mentoring, coaching and a training budget for personal development.​

You will also be part of our maturing design community of practice, benefitting from:

• weekly community meetups​
• regular design reviews (crits)​
• weekly show and tells​
• face to face design away days​
• face to face design and user research away days

As a senior interaction designer, you will be the senior designer in one or more multidisciplinary agile teams with other digital and technical experts to deliver multiple digital services. You will be responsible for managing and organising design work between yourself and other designers in the team, and proficient at switching between being a practitioner and senior design decision maker in a variety of projects.

As a practitioner you will work out the best way to allow users to interact with services, in terms of both overall flow and at the level of individual design elements. You will be a confident and competent designer who is able to develop designs based on evidence of user needs and organisational outcomes.

As a senior decision maker leading the design work in agile teams you will understand who is best placed to take on design work, given the team capacity, the type of work required and individual designers' development needs.

As a senior member of the team, you will positively impact design maturity at HM Land Registry, the skills and development of designers, and cost/time savings from well-designed services for both the organisation and customers.

HMLR believe that a blended approach to where you work that enables some time working from home, as well as in the office may give you an improved experience and has clear business benefits.  We expect everyone to typically spend at least 60% of their working time in the office. 

Person specification

Throughout the selection process, we will use Success Profiles to assess the following essential experience, technical skills and behaviours. We’ll also be assessing your experience and specialist technical skills against the skills defined in the Digital, Data and Technology Profession Capability Framework for the senior interaction designer role. 

Essential skills and experience:  

• a strong grounding and experience in user-centred design, from concept to final delivery
• experience in a more strategic design role, leading other designers at a project level, and making tactical, pragmatic decisions to influence strategic goals and develop design maturity 
• the ability to listen to the needs of senior technical and business stakeholders, and interpret them in a way that is clear for everyone
• experience of managing stakeholder expectations, setting direction and navigating difficult discussions within the team or with diverse senior stakeholders
• knowledge of what good end-to-end public services look like and how to direct designers to design in an inclusive, accessible way
• the ability to absorb large amounts of conflicting information and use it to produce designs which improve the user experience, removing complexity from services and solving problems
• experience of planning and managing backlogs of design work, making key decisions that help the organisation meet planned objectives
• the ability to identify, understand and at times challenge constraints and adjust how design work is approached in the team to work within them
• confident presenting and delivering your/teams work, whether that is within your agile team, or with the design community of practice that you will be part of
• comfortable collaborating and making decisions at a project level with your senior counterparts in service and content design and adjacent practices such as user research, business analysis, software development, and product
• experience of developing people within a design team, confident in collaborating with team leads and head of practice to develop people, capabilities and skills to meet the practices strategic objectives
• experience of creating interactive prototypes in code

Essential technical skills 

• creating usable, responsive and accessible user interfaces
• sketching, concept creating and designing prototypes
• understanding senior stakeholder needs and using design to inform and persuade these audiences

Please see the attached candidate pack for more information. 

Benefits

Alongside your salary of £41,887, HM Land Registry contributes £11,309 towards you being a member of the Civil Service Defined Benefit Pension scheme. Find out what benefits a Civil Service Pension provides.

Things you need to know

Selection process details

This vacancy is using Success Profiles (opens in a new window), and will assess your Behaviours, Strengths and Experience.

We want to keep this process as easy as possible for you so just upload an anonymised CV to include your qualifications, career history, skills and experience when prompted. We ask that you do not include any personal details.

The Personal Statement section (in no more than 750 words) should be used to provide details of how you meet the essential criteria listed within the Person Specification on the attached Candidate Pack.

The sift will take place shortly after the closing date.

If you are successful at sift, then you will be invited to attend a blended video interview, week commencing Monday 12 February 2024, which will be held remotely through MS Teams.

Further information will be provided to those who are selected to interview. This will include completing a design task which you will present at interview.

The blended interview will assess the behaviours, key skills and experience listed in the Person Specification, as well as the strengths associated with the role.

Please note, the Civil Service values honesty and integrity and expect all candidates to abide by these principles. Please ensure all examples provided throughout the entire recruitment process are of your own experience. HM Land Registry take any incidences of cheating very seriously. Any detected instances of plagiarism or other forms of cheating, including the use of artificial intelligence, will be investigated and, if proven, the relevant applications will be withdrawn from the process.

HMLR is accredited to the Disability Confident Scheme, which denotes organisations which have a positive attitude towards disabled people. Disabled applicants who meet the minimum essential criteria at the shortlisting stage are guaranteed an invitation to interview.  If you require the panel to consider a reasonable adjustment or there is anything else you would like the panel to take into consideration, you are asked to notify us of this at application stage where possible or during the process as soon as it becomes a requirement.

If you would like further information about the use of your personal data, please click on the link below: 

Job Applicant Personal Information 

Feedback will only be provided if you attend an interview or assessment.

Security

Successful candidates must undergo a criminal record check. People working with government assets must complete baseline personnel security standard (opens in new window) checks.

Nationality requirements

This job is broadly open to the following groups:

• UK nationals
• nationals of the Republic of Ireland
• nationals of Commonwealth countries who have the right to work in the UK
• nationals of the EU, Switzerland, Norway, Iceland or Liechtenstein and family members of those nationalities with settled or pre-settled status under the European Union Settlement Scheme (EUSS) (opens in a new window)
• nationals of the EU, Switzerland, Norway, Iceland or Liechtenstein and family members of those nationalities who have made a valid application for settled or pre-settled status under the European Union Settlement Scheme (EUSS)
• individuals with limited leave to remain or indefinite leave to remain who were eligible to apply for EUSS on or before 31 December 2020
• Turkish nationals, and certain family members of Turkish nationals, who have accrued the right to work in the Civil Service

Further information on nationality requirements (opens in a new window)

Working for the Civil Service

The Civil Service Code (opens in a new window) sets out the standards of behaviour expected of civil servants.

We recruit by merit on the basis of fair and open competition, as outlined in the Civil Service Commission's recruitment principles (opens in a new window). The Civil Service embraces diversity and promotes equal opportunities. As such, we run a Disability Confident Scheme (DCS) for candidates with disabilities who meet the minimum selection criteria. The Civil Service also offers a Redeployment Interview Scheme to civil servants who are at risk of redundancy, and who meet the minimum requirements for the advertised vacancy.