Lead UI Designer

Lead UI Designer

c. £75,000 per annum

Bedford Based (occasional travel to London)

Hybrid Working

Permanent

As a Lead Interaction Designer at Money and Pensions Service (MaPS) you’ll have a strong brand and creative marketing background as well as being a talented digital UI designer. With an intimate understanding of designing for the web with special attention on usability and accessibility, you’ll bring energy and enthusiasm to our expanding digital capability.

The ideal candidate will balance conceptual and analytical strengths whilst developing strong digital visuals and creative to support a consistent design and optimal user experience across multiple platforms to deliver large-scale, business-critical programmes of work.

Here is an insight to Money and Pension Service:

At the heart of the Money and Pensions Service are our values – caring, connecting and transforming, which are the foundation of our success.We help people – particularly those most in need – to improve their financial wellbeing and build a better, more confident future. Working collaboratively across the UK, we make sure customers can access high-quality money and pensions guidance and debt advice throughout their lives, however and whenever they need it.

In this role you will be responsible for the following;

• Leading collaborative design processes for multiple complex projects.
• Collaborating with cross-functional teams to shape and communicate the brand and visual identity for MaPS’s digital channels.
• Fostering an environment of creativity and design excellence by leading inspiration sessions and sharing examples of outstanding design.
• Communicating with designers and researchers on other programmes to avoid duplication, maximise learning, and ensure the coherence and consistency of MaPS digital experiences.
• Collaborating with relevant internal teams to ensure our services meet MaPS and GDS standards for suitability, efficacy, usability, accessibility, quality, security, and data protection.
• Provide creative direction and solutions for UI design across multiple services and platforms.
• Lead the development of our design systems including governance, socialisation, tooling, and alignment with the GOV.UK design system.
• Provide creative direction for the development of our advertising campaigns as well as marketing and promotional collateral for our corporate and consumer products and services.
• Play a key role in the visual development our brand identity, working with the brand team and agencies to evolve existing guidelines across products and services.

You will need to demonstrate the following skills and experience;

• Extensive user interface design experience (likely to be 10 years or more). Some of this may be in an adjacent role such as brand, advertising, or interaction design.
• Experience in creative marketing, art direction and/or advertising, including creating and directing high-quality campaign creative.
• Understanding of data visualisation principles and ability to create clear, high-quality charts, graphs, and infographics.
• Basic illustration skills, including experience designing icons.
• Experience designing for conversion and using visual design to help users complete difficult online journeys.
• Understanding of designing for reuse, such as Atomic design, templating, component and pattern libraries, and design tokens.
• Able to balance practitioner work with higher level tactical or strategic activities.
• Experience with Figma, Miro, and Adobe Creative Cloud or equivalent tools.
• Experience designing to meet WCAG 2.2 Level AA accessibility guidelines.
• A basic understanding of accessible, cross-browser front-end development to inform high quality, implementable solutions.
• Experience with mobile-first, responsive website design.
• Experience of working with content rich and/or data-intensive websites, ideally for a consumer audience.
• Experience in the public sector or other regulated field (e.g. financial services, medicine, law).

Portfolio:

We don’t require a portfolio, but if you have one we’d love to see it. If not, we’d like a short statement (up to 500 words — less is fine) explaining how specific projects or experience of yours demonstrate your ability to succeed in this role.

You will be leading UI design for a consumer– and business-facing services so we are especially interested in examples which involve one or more of:

• Making difficult information accessible and compelling to non-experts
• Developing an online marketing campaign
• Developing or evolving a digital brand
• A large, content-heavy website
• Leading the creation and/or management of a design system
• Working to the GDS service standard
• Working for a public sector organisation
• Working in a financial services or other regulated environment

Our inclusive working environment

By fostering our values, we are immensely proud of the inclusive working environment that we have created. By way of brief example, we have an enviable ethnic diversity mix, equal gender balance with a zero mean gender pay gap and thriving colleague and ally networks, including LGBTQ+, neurodiversity, women’s health, men's health, ethnicity, and diversity.

What Money and Pensions Service can offer you?

• Generous Annual Leave – 30 days plus Bank Holidays
• Pension scheme – contributions matched 2 to 1 (up to 10% of your salary)
• Interest-free loan to help you buy season tickets for buses and trains
• Cycle to work Scheme
• Subsidised eye test & flu jabs
• Life assurance scheme
• Give as you earn scheme
• Employee assistance programme (EAP)
• PAM Assist and PAM Life scheme (Wellbeing)
• Enhanced family and sick pay
• Paid volunteering (2 days a year)
• Recognition Scheme
• Discounts portal to numerous retailers

Job Reference: MaPS00936

Close Date: 26/08/2025