UX Designer / User Researcher

Job Title: UX Designer / User Researcher
Location: Hybrid - London or Bristol (80% Remote working)
Duration: 12 Months
Clearance Required: Active MOD SC - Sole UK National required
Rate: £750 per day - PAYE via Umbrella Only

Overview:
Working within an agile digital delivery team developing and supporting a mission critical application for the UK MOD, with instances hosted on both a secure cloud platform (AWS) and on VMs hosted a managed on-prem hosting environment. The application is extant and Live.

You are to be the lead UX Designer and User Researcher, working with a Product Owner proactively engaging with the Client's broad array of senior (MOD) military and civilian senior stakeholders and end User representatives, gain understanding of user needs based on different personas, capturing and turning that into designs that can be agreed with the Users and implemented into the application by the developers.

You will have experience of working with users in Public Sector (ideally Defence specifically), of various user research techniques, including conducting User interviews, creating personas, mapping user journeys and pain points, designing wireframes and prototypes, conducting usability testing to iterate and improve the User Experience. You will be comfortable using the supporting tools for Agile product delivery such as JIRA (User Story / Defect / Task Management), Confluence (Documentation / Comms), and Slack (collaboration / comms).

Key Responsibilities:

• Conduct user research using interviews, workshops, and usability testing with MOD stakeholders and end users.
• Create and maintain personas, user journeys, and experience maps to inform design decisions.
• Design wireframes, interactive prototypes, and high-fidelity mock-ups using Figma.
• Define and maintain a design system aligned with accessibility and performance standards.
• Collaborate with developers to ensure design-to-code alignment for React (TypeScript) components.
• Provide UX acceptance criteria for automated tests (Cypress, accessibility checks).
• Conduct usability testing and iterate designs based on feedback and analytics.
• Document research findings, design decisions, and UX guidelines in Confluence.
• Work with the Product Owner to prioritise UX improvements in Jira and ensure traceability.
• Advocate for inclusive design and compliance with WCAG accessibility standards.

Essential Skills
Design & Prototyping:

• Figma (Proficient) - components, variants, design tokens, prototyping.

User Research:

• Experience with interviews, surveys, usability testing, and synthesizing insights.

Collaboration Tools:

• Jira (work tracking), Confluence (documentation), Slack (comms).

Frontend Awareness:

• React (TypeScript) - understanding component structure, responsive design, and state management.

Accessibility & Performance:

• Core Web Vitals awareness.

Testing Awareness:

• Cypress (E2E), k6 (performance) - understanding how UX acceptance criteria map to automated tests.

Clearance:

• MOD SC - UK National required.

Travel:
Hybrid role, predominantly remote, but some travel to Client site will be required (estimate 4 - 5 times per month to London and/or the South / South-East).