Head of User-centred Design

1 month ago


Remote, United Kingdom UK Health Security Agency Full time

National £65,302 - £75,129

Inner £69,275 - £78,805

We are looking for a Head of UCD who can work as part of a leadership team to build and lead the UCD team within UKHSA. As head of the UCD community you will provide leadership across the job family. Attracting, nurturing, developing and growing a diverse and talented workforce, promoting their professional development and creating the right conditions and environment in which they can flourish, so that UKHSA has the people, processes, and ways of working in place that ensure the needs of users are understood and consistently and systematically prioritised.

An expert practitioner in UCD with broad experience leading work that spans the different disciplines you’ll be able to define and assure best practice, leading, coaching and mentoring others, including coaching senior stakeholders and professionals from other disciplines in user-centredness.

Working with the Deputy Director the role will be responsible for defining UKHSA’s approach to UCD and building the expert UCD capability needed to design and deliver stand out, equitable and inclusive products, services and user journeys, transforming organisational culture.

1. Act as a recognised and credible UCD expert within UKHSA; supporting the establishment of an effective user-centred culture within the organisation, utilising your expert influencing and negotiating skills to persuade colleagues of the value of a user-centred, evidence-based approach.
2. Lead and grow a sustainable UCD practice and community in a distributed management model where design practitioners are embedded within delivery teams and often not within direct line management.
3. Provide strong leadership to ensure the UCD team has the people, processes, budgets, tools, and systems in place to operate effectively.
4. Continually shape and improve UCD practice, accountable for building the skills of the UCD team - ensuring that the team develop the desired UCD skills and experience to build a mature design function within UKHSA, including sourcing specialist learning and fostering a culture of continuous professional development.
5. Support service transformation by providing design capability, ensuring the UCD function works collaboratively and achieves engagement with professions across UKHSA, to support faster and more accurate problem solving at scale; balancing user needs and stakeholder goals to design effective, accessible and inclusive services, making sure UCD colleagues and suppliers deliver quality and value for money and ensuring services meet government service standards for design

For the full list of duties and responsibilities, please see the attached Job Description.

Working for the UKHSA

**Benefits**:
**There are many benefits of working at UKHSA, including**:

- flexible hybrid working with flexi-time and the option to consider work part-time or condensed hours
- a Civil Service Pension with an average employer contribution of 27%
- 26 days annual leave allowance increasing to 32 days after a 10-year service.
- an in-year bonus scheme to recognise high performance
- career progression and coaching, including a training budget for personal development
- paid volunteering leave (5 special leave days per year)
- a focus on wellbeing with access to an employee assistance programme
- job satisfaction from making government services easier to use and more inclusive for people across the UK
- advances on pay, including for travel season tickets
- death in service benefits
- cycle to work scheme and facilities
- access to an employee discounts schemes
- 5 learning days per year
- access to a suite of learning activities through Civil Service learning

About the team

The UCD team draws together experts in design and delivery with a shared mission to create an organisation that puts an understanding of users, their needs, and experiences at the heart of policy making, and service and product design and delivery, to improve organisational performance.

**To achieve our mission, the UCD team will**:

- Influence
- Enable
- Grow the UCD profession and give all staff the tools they need to embody user-centricity; providing a place for expert UCD capability to flourish, and the tools, guidance and frameworks needed to enable all staff to build UCD knowledge and skills.
- Deliver
- Deploy our expert capability to help the organisation to solve problems and improve products and services by bring a problem-focused user-centric approach to transformation initiatives.

As Head of UCD you will be part of the leadership team establishing the UCD function within UKHSA. You will lead on the ‘Enable’ pillar of our mission growing and fostering expert UCD capability across the organisation and embedding UCD practices into the way in which we design and deliver products and services, supporting UKHSA to deliver against its mission to save lives and protect livelihoods.

This is a great development opportunity for an experience



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