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 now looking for Senior Service Designers to join our Digital, Data and Technology team to help us to achieve this by designing accessible public services that are simple enough for everyone to use that work across multiple channels, devices, browsers, and platform

Job description

As a Senior service designer you will work as part of one or more multidisciplinary agile teams with other digital and technical experts to deliver multiple related digital services. 

You will work out the best way to allow users to interact with services, in terms of both overall flows, designing from front to back, and end to end.  

You will be responsible for managing and organizing design work between yourself and other designers in the team and be adept at switching between being a practitioner and senior design decision maker in a variety of projects. 

• As a practitioner you will work on the end-to-end journey of a service including the creation of, or change to, transactions, products, and content across both digital and offline channels provided by different parts of HM Land Registry. You will be a confident and competent service designer who is able to develop designs based on evidence of user needs and organisational outcomes.  
• As a senior decision maker, you will lead the service design work in one or more agile teams and 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 organization and customers.

Responsibilities:

You will:

• manage and contribute service design work as part of multidisciplinary agile teams, delivering new and improving existing services that meet user needs and HM Land Registry policy objectives
• analyse and interpret user needs and business objectives in highly complex service areas
• develop and recommend service design concepts that help re-imagine how services can be delivered end-to-end and identify potential areas of improvement
• work with counterpart senior user researchers, business analysts and developers to turn concepts into user-centered services
• initiate and lead design thinking workshops such as problem framing with your immediate teams, senior project stakeholders and users
• present and deliver your work back, whether this is to senior project stakeholders, within your agile team, or at community critique and feedback sessions
• contribute to the development of our service design standards and service pattern library so that designers can create digital services that are consistent, accessible, and easy to use
• have a role in maintaining quality and service design standards across related projects
• work with the wider project team to ensure that services meet the digital service standard, coordinating and leading in service assessments as necessary to provide service design evidence to support the relevant points
• collaborate with senior service designers across government to identify and design scalable, cross-government service design patterns and standards
• support the growth of our service design discipline within the design community of practice, by sharing knowledge, skills and coaching our people to elevate this function

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 Service Designer role. 

Essential skills and experience:

You will have:

• significant experience designing services, from concept to final delivery
• knowledge of what good end-to-end public services look like and how to design services in an inclusive, accessible way.
• experience of making evidence-based decisions to meet user needs – this could be across multiple connecting agile projects or distinct pieces of work
• the ability to identify and understand constraints across multiple projects, communicate these and work within them.
• the ability to absorb large amounts of conflicting information and use it to guide yourself and other designers in, in removing complexity, solving problems, and designing services that are easy-to-use and understand
• experience of creating service design artefacts, for example: service prototypes, service blueprints, experience and user journey maps, problem framing and problem statements. You will be able to select the right artefact for the context of your work. You will also contribute to the creation of reusable templates for service designers to use.
• using your expert practitioner skills, you can also guide others through the process of creating a service prototype and provide expert critique of the team’s method and work
• experience of iteratively establishing service design patterns and teaching other designers and related disciplines how to use them.
• creating, planning, and facilitating workshops with stakeholders of all levels, in hybrid working environments
• storytelling - creating stories that communicate the value of your team’s work for customers, senior stakeholders, and the organisation

Desirable skills and experience:

• Experience of planning service design activities on complex digital transformation projects

Essential technical skills 

• Creating, and managing other designers creating, usable, consistent, and accessible services.
• Understanding user needs, participating in research activities, and using research to inform design.
• Understanding senior stakeholder needs and using design to inform and persuade these audiences.

Please see the attached candidate pack for more information. 

This role is part of the Government Digital and Data Profession and may attract an additional supplement. The amount is the result of a capability assessment which will be determined during the application and interview process to assess your capability level.

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.

Benefits

Alongside your salary of £46,058, HM Land Registry contributes £12,435 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, Experience and Technical skills.

Please complete the online application form to include your work history and qualifications.

You should then use the Personal Statement section to explain in detail how you meet the essential key skills and experience criteria in the person specification (in up to 750 words maximum).

You will then be asked to complete the Technical section. You will have 500 words maximum (about 250 words per criterion) to demonstrate how you meet the following essential technical skills criteria listed in the person specification:

• Understanding user needs, participating in research activities, and using research to inform design.
• Understanding senior stakeholder needs and using design to inform and persuade these audiences.

We ask that you do not include any personal details.

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 4 March 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, experience, and technical skills listed in the Person Specification. You will also present your pre-prepared design task.

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.