Associate Service Designer

If you’re a Service Designer with a couple of year’s experience, post university and looking for a step up and want to work on meaningful, high-impact services used by millions of people, this is a role worth exploring.

We’re looking for an Associate Service Designer to support experience design across major public sector transformation programmes — helping teams understand user needs and design services that are simpler, more inclusive and easier to use.

You’ll work as part of multidisciplinary teams, contributing to service design activities while continuing to build your skills, confidence and design judgement.

What you’ll be doing

In this role, you’ll contribute to service design activities across discovery and delivery, helping teams better understand users, improve journeys and iterate services over time.

• Support the identification of user needs, pain points and opportunities, working with researchers and designers to define problems clearly
• Create and contribute to user journeys, service maps and design artefacts to communicate ideas and improve services
• Help refine service concepts through continuous feedback, iteration and small improvements
• Contribute to co-creation workshops and collaborative design activities with stakeholders and multidisciplinary teams
• Work within agile teams to develop, test and improve service solutions over time
• Begin to analyse basic data and research insight to identify trends, issues and opportunities
• Clearly communicate design decisions and rationale to team members and stakeholders
• Support the creation of design documentation and artefacts (e.g. journey maps, presentations, design histories) to share work openly
• Develop an understanding of how your work contributes to wider organisational and service strategy

What you’ll bring:

• Service Design experience gained in consultancy, agency or client-side environments.
• Experience contributing to end-to-end services across digital and non-digital channels.
• Ability to identify user needs and map basic journeys aligned to those needs
• Experience working collaboratively in multidisciplinary teams
• Ability to explain design decisions clearly and effectively
• Understanding of service design methods, including journey mapping and service blueprinting
• Awareness of data and research methods, and how they inform design decisions
• Understanding of accessibility and inclusive design principles, and how to apply them in practice
• Strong communication skills and attention to detail
• Confidence to work independently with guidance from more senior designers
• A portfolio demonstrating your approach, thinking and contribution to service design work

Nice to have but not essential:

• Prototyping experience
• Knowledge of Gov.uk Design Patterns and Design System
• Experience of going through GDS assessment