Principal User Researcher and Service Designer

**Details**:
**Reference number**:

- 283685**Salary**:

- £50,829- National: £50,829 Outer London: £52,741 London: £54,655**Job grade**:

- Grade 7**Contract type**:

- Permanent
- Loan
- Secondment**Length of employment**:

- This role is being advertised on a permanent basis. Loan or Secondment options will also be available if preferable.**Business area**:

- DHSC - Office for Health Improvement and Disparities - OHID-Public Health Analysis**Type of role**:

- Architecture and Data
- Digital
- Intelligence**Working pattern**:

- Flexible working, Full-time, Job share, Part-time**Number of jobs available**:

- 1Contents

Location

About the job

**Benefits**:
Things you need to know

Location
- Birmingham, Bristol, Cambridge, Chilton, Fareham, Leeds, Liverpool, London, Newcastle-upon-Tyne, Nottingham, Sheffield, YorkAbout the job

**Job summary**:
In DHSC, we are proud of our purpose - to enable everyone to live more independent, healthier lives for longer. To achieve this, and create a great place to work, we have four values: we are inclusive, we constantly improve, we challenge, and we are agile. If this sounds like an environment you’d like to work in, we’d love to hear from you.

The Office for Health Improvement and Disparities (OHID) officially launched on 1 October 2021 with the aim of tackling health inequalities across the country. As part of DHSC, OHID brings together expert advice, analysis and evidence with policy development and implementation working with the whole of government, the NHS, local government, industry and wider partners to shape and drive health improvement and equalities priorities for government.

The Public Health Analysis Unit (PHAU) in OHID within The Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) provides trusted, authoritative epidemiological analyses and advice to inform policy or decision making with the aim of improving the health of the population and reducing health disparities.

Data and statistics play a vital role in informing decision making and policy development in health, public health and social care, and the importance of reliable high-quality data and evidence has been highlighted even more by the COVID-19 pandemic.

The PHAU mission is to improve the public’s health and reduce disparities by supporting data-driven decisions across the public health system. We do this by undertaking non-communicable disease surveillance, monitoring trends and patterns in non-communicable diseases, risk factors and the wider determinants of health. This enables us to provide our stakeholders with public health intelligence and to support them to understand and use it through knowledge transfer and training.

We are recruiting to our digital health intelligence team into the role of Principal User Researcher and Service Designer. This is a new and exciting role to building on our existing systems but to also be part of a team that is charged with transforming our health intelligence and monitoring offer to a wide range of stakeholders with a variety of user needs. This role and the team are vital elements in delivering PHAU’s mission by ensuring we publish our health analysis in a transparent and user-friendly way that is compliant with GDS and the official statistics code of practice.

**Job description**:
You will be a user researcher with complimentary service design expertise, you will be able to plan and lead research for teams and complex digital services. You will influence service proposition, align user research activities with wider plans and embed user centred practices within the team.

The government’s approach to digital and IT puts user needs at the heart of decision making. Therefore as a service researcher and service designer you will support product teams by generating new and useful user insights into service design propositions and work closely with analysts, interaction and content designers and developers to iteratively improve services for users.

You will be experienced in using a variety of methods to reveal actionable insights.

You will have excellent analytical and problem-solving skills, and the ability to quickly develop recommendations and service design proposals or changes based on quantitative and qualitative evidence.

You will need to be confident in explaining service designs and user needs to a wide audience. You will have experience working with agile development teams. You will be able to introduce user research practices into a team, establish a user centred culture, and continually monitor and improve practices.

**Role responsibilities**
- Focus on leading and doing user research for complex and high-profile Agile projects, programmes and/or portfolios of work.
- Be a knowledge expert in the user research field and lead on user research and strategic issues, through effective planning, implementation and review.
- Working with user researchers and service managers to develop and advocate appropriate research strategies