Lead Ux/content Designer

**Lead UX/Content Designer**

**Permanent**

**Grade 6 - £47,573 - £58,981**

**Working 36.5 Hours per week**

**Job Overview**
This is a lead role both in terms of design skills and team management. We need an experienced team leader who can get the best out of our designers as well as effectively communicate with our stakeholders. You will be responsible for developing and leading the user experience and content community across the organisation, setting standards, and taking responsibility for the professional development of the team and management performance.

Applicants should be comfortable with working with and coaching senior leaders, as articulating the value of user centred design across the organisation will be something you will be doing. You will also be creating, sharing, and championing user experience and content principles, standards, guidance, and style patterns for the organisation to ensure quality, consistency, and an excellent online user experience for all our customers

**What we are about**
You will be joining the growing and exciting user centred design team in one of the largest digital teams in local government. We are passionate about user centred design, critical thinking, problem solving and designing amazing digital services and products.

We build and maintain common platforms, products and tools spanning over 250 services to create great public services that are accessible, inclusive and easy to use.This requires us to be brave in our approach, challenging the status quo, sharing learning and being creative to innovate new solutions.

**Our teams are organised around delivering on our priorities. These are**:

- Promoting an agile, iterative user centred design practices to everything that we do
- Being data driven
- Working in multi-disciplinary teams
- Working closely with our partners

**What you will do**
This role will offer you the opportunity to work as part of an exciting new Product function, designed to challenge how the City of Birmingham designs services for residents, and be innovative and creative in our approach for designing the right internet age technology to support our citizens and colleagues.
- You will have the opportunity to shape, challenge and be bold as we transform into a truly digital, user-centred organisation.
- As the Lead UX/Content Designer you will:

- Manage the team of UX and content designers, their learning and development, and performance management.
- Develop and lead the user experience and content design community across the organisation.
- Be part of a supportive and enthusiastic User Centred Design leadership team committed to nurturing the skills and talents of our discipline.
- Design and build a user experience and content architecture based on user centred design principles
- Directly lead the user experience and content design of our most complex interactions, products and services, including across multiple product teams concurrently to deliver services from end to end from discovery to live

**Who you will be**

Whether you have more of a UX or content background, you will be comfortable leading a team that does both, and you will have experience of creating strategies and operating models, information architecture, content management systems, prototyping tools and website reviews and redesign.

We are looking for someone passionate about user centred design, experienced in managing people, caring, collaborative and supportive. Whether you have a local government background or not, you will understand that our busy environment requires pragmatism over purism and that our team members will have a range of experience to nurture and grow.

**You should be**:

- Highly experienced in UX and Content design, with thorough knowledge of design principles, government standards and accessibility needs.
- At home and happy in an agile environment of multi-disciplinary teams.
- Able to work with services unfamiliar with agile or user centred design and meet them where they are starting from to take them on that journey.
- Able to thrive in a busy environment with high demands for UX and content design work, and effectively prioritise and negotiate.
- Able to support user experience and content across all channels.
- A good communicator who can build successful relationships with stakeholders and your team
- A role model for our values, leading by example to help transform our culture and foster a high trust, empowered and inclusive environment where teams and individuals thrive.
- Someone who knows when to compromise and when to enforce standards and principles.

**About Us**

This is a really exciting time to be joining Birmingham City Council’s Digital and Technology Services Department. We are Europe’s largest local authority, and with unprecedented investment in people and digital, a solid strategy, empowering leadership and a newly redesigned service to get behind, we are building digital services centred on the needs of ou