Job Description
What we’re looking for:
We’re looking for a skilled practitioner with significant experience in delivering design projects. The focus of your role will be to create end-to-end, evidence-based designs for services & products which are inclusive, accessible and planet-friendly. You’ll often be working with multidisciplinary teams on complex projects where autonomy and project management will be important.
We’re on the hunt for someone who will champion our values: to care passionately, be fluent in people, believe in your craft, push convention, be open to change, value each other.
We work with a broad range of clients, some of whom are completely new to user-centred design (UCD). This means you’ll also play a key role in championing our UCD approach.
The role may also involve:
1. Leading and directing projects – You’ll lead multidisciplinary teams and clients in the pursuit of inclusive, accessible and planet-friendly services.
2. Team support and management – You’ll help to support the design team by inspiring and line managing team members, including overseeing appraisals and professional development.
3. Defining and refining practice – You’ll help to define the way our disciplines work together, and progress the way NEC Digital Studio does inclusive, sustainable design.
4. Supporting new business – You’ll help NEC Digital Studio find and win work by spotting opportunities with clients and helping with proposals and pitches.
Your skills and experience:
We’d like to hear from you if you have skills or experience in some or all of these areas:
5. Research – You work with user researchers and service designers as part of a multi-disciplinary team to create designs based on research that meet user needs. Experience in facilitating user research and usability testing is desirable.
6. User-centred journeys & experiences – You choose the right approaches to lead projects to outcomes that are great for the user, feasible to implement, and fit the client’s strategic vision.
7. Facilitation – Lead on design workshops and design sprints with the team, senior stakeholders and users
8. Verbal Communication – You clearly explain complex problems and design decisions to non-design stakeholders, including risks and unresolved issues, and build consensus by asking difficult questions and challenging assumptions.
9. Visual communication – You lead teams to make clear and compelling points through well-designed visuals. This may include drawing and sketching or graphic communication
10. Written communication – You guide teams on the most appropriate written formats and structures for each project. You create and oversee clear, concise writing
11. Prototyping – You lead teams, clients and stakeholders to scope targeted prototyping exercises. You work across disciplines to design, build and test prototypes in various fidelities that contribute to project outcomes. It’s also desirable but not essential if you can prototype in code to create dynamic prototypes using HTML, CSS and Javascript
12. Accessibility awareness – strong understanding of accessibility standards and can confidently help teams apply accessibility best practice across every project phase
13. Design to development – foster excellent working relationships between design and development teams, ensuring smooth delivery of software builds and testing.
14. Stakeholder management – you know how to negotiate and guide clients and stakeholders towards positive outcomes that deliver outcomes within budget
15. Proactive and autonomous – you can lead the conversation, and look for ways to participate and add value
16. Iterative Design – You refine solutions through continuous feedback and testing, ensuring designs evolve in response to user needs, constraints, and business goals
17. Evidence-Based Design – You ground design decisions in user research findings, using data and insights to validate approaches, reduce risk, and improve usability
18. GDS Knowledge – You have experience in the GDS delivery approach including, knowledge of the GDS design system, principles and service standard.
How we work:
We work with central and local government, the NHS, charity and private sector organisations. We also often work with our NECSWS colleagues, which includes sectors such as Public Safety and Justice, amongst other areas.
We work hand in hand with our clients and sometimes we’re embedded in their teams for projects. We’ll endeavour to move you on to different sectors after 3 - 12 months because we want you to get a variety of experiences, from applying GDS (government digital service) standards, to improving customer buy-in. On occasion there can be longer term engagements where everyone benefits from the deep knowledge that we gain.
Beyond individual projects, NEC Digital Studio’s Interaction Designers support each other at weekly meet-ups where we share our work, discuss its wider implications, and learn about methods.
You’ll also broaden your skills by working closely with members of our other Digital teams, including service designers, content designers, developers and user researchers.
All of our Interaction Designers are supported by more senior members of the Product Design team. They look after your wellbeing, help you set goals and objectives and provide feedback to help you grow.
Qualifications
We welcome applicants from all professional backgrounds. We acknowledge that we didn’t all start out as interaction designers and are proud of the varied expertise amongst our team. Our minimum criteria is that you have degree or professional experience that is relevant to interaction design.
Additional Information
We pride ourselves in offering an excellent benefits package, including an above average pension scheme. When you join the team at NEC Software Solutions, you are provided with the following:
19. Private Medical Cover funded by NEC for Employees (with the option to add family members at an additional cost)
20. 25 days paid holiday with the option to buy/sell (FTE)
21. 4 x basic salary life assurance cover funded by NEC (with the option to increase cover at an additional cost)
22. A Group Pension Plan with fantastic employer contributions up to a maximum of
23. A selection of flexible benefits to suit your individual needs
24. All colleagues get free access to LinkedIn Learning. Over 15000 courses covering a huge breadth of subjects. Learn about what you like, when you like, how you like.