Senior Service Designer - Inside IR35 Contract

We are looking for an experienced Senior Service Designer to work within a multidisciplinary team delivering complex digital services for a UK public sector client. You will lead service design activity across the service lifecycle, working from Discovery and Alpha through Beta and Live, depending on the assignment. You will help teams understand complex service landscapes, identify user and organisational needs, and design coherent end-to-end services across digital and non-digital channels. Working alongside user researchers, interaction designers, content designers, product managers, business analysts, delivery managers, developers, architects, policy colleagues and operational teams, you will ensure services are designed around user needs while considering policy, technology and operational constraints. You will be expected to work confidently within a GOV.UK Service Standard and Government Digital and Data environment, helping teams make evidence-based design decisions and prepare services for assessment where required. Key responsibilities You will: - 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. We are particularly interested in contractors who can demonstrate: - 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.