Senior Content Designer

**Research England**

**Senior Content Designer**

**Salary**:£43,116 - £47,076 per annum

**Hours**:Full time.

**Contract Type**:Fixed Term (concluding Dec 2029)

**Location**:Westward House, Bristol (hybrid working)

**Grade**:UKRI Band E

**Closing Date**:18 Feb 24

**Job Purpose**

**About the Research Excellence Framework (REF)**

The Research Excellence Framework (REF) is the system for assessing the quality of research in UK higher education institutions, with the most recent exercise concluding in 2021. It is a peer review assessment process involving submissions from higher education institutions across the UK. Research England delivered REF 2021 on behalf of the four UK funding bodies and the results have driven the annual distribution of approximately £2 billion of research funding to UK universities.

**Purpose of the role**

An exciting opportunity to lead and shape the design, development, and delivery of the UK’s next research assessment exercise.

We require systems to be delivered to support:

- Administration of the exercise
- The submission of large volumes of research data from all participating HEIs
- The dissemination and assessment of all elements of the research data submitted.

You will provide content design expertise on all digital services and REF publications where content design is a key part of the scope, using a variety of user experience design techniques and methodologies. You will ensure that the team/project/programme takes a user centred, evidenced based approach to content design and support in aligning content across systems and policy development.

In addition to content design you will also prepare and deliver training and user guidance required to support the running of the exercise. A background in training is a real must.

You can contribute to a user centred design internal community of practice to share expertise and standard approaches to content design within UKRI.

A self-starter, you will be empowered to drive your own learning and development whilst maintaining your expertise in GDS standards and principles.

**Shortlisting criteria**:

- Essential:_
- Experience of working in agile delivery teams
- Experience of content designing large or sophisticated projects/programmes using a variety of user experience design techniques
- Experience of driving content design practices, tools and techniques
- Experience of working in an agile software delivery team: planning, conducting and delivering designs well ahead of the development pipeline
- Extensive experience of creating, iterating, managing and overseeing content across multiple channels - and identify gaps in content design skills and capability and can help teams grow and develop
- Experience in developing and rolling out training across a diverse user community
- Desirable:_
- Experience of working standard design toolkits and tools, ideally with the GDS Design system and prototype kit.

**Interview criteria***
- Experience of working in an agile software delivery team: planning, conducting and delivering designs well ahead of the development pipeline
- Extensive experience of creating, iterating, managing and overseeing content across multiple channels - and identify gaps in content design skills and capability and can help teams grow and develop
- Experience of being part of a community of user experience members to share expertise and best practice within the REF team
- Experience of working in multi-disciplinary teams where team members come from different organisations or parts of the business, including suppliers and contractors
- Experience of iterating a live digital service - working with business stakeholders on content reviews

**Key areas of accountability**

**Agile working (content design)**. You can understand the role of content in multidisciplinary teams and can articulate and advocate it. You can work collaboratively with colleagues from other disciplines in multidisciplinary teams. You can identify and compare the best processes or delivery methods to use, and can measure and evaluate them, helping the team to decide the best approach. You can help teams manage and visualise outcomes, prioritise work, define scope and agree a minimum viable product (MVP). (Skill level: practitioner)

**Content concepts and prototyping**. You can build and create a variety of different prototypes, from paper sketches to coded prototypes. You can choose the most appropriate option to visualise content in context for different audiences. You can effectively combine prototypes with other content and design outputs to test with users and show to stakeholders. You can establish content patterns, and test and iterate them. (Skill level: practitioner)

**Stakeholder relationship management (content design)**. You can negotiate with and influence stakeholders, and manage relationships effectively. You can influence decisions, deal with challenging situations and remove blockers. You can build long-term str