We’re hiring a User Experience Design Lead
Our user experience designers work across our most critical products and platforms. Our mission is to design inclusive and effective ways of solving complex problems with technology.
➛Take me to the job application [Closing date 18th August]
➛Chat to Kylie about the role
We’re looking for an experienced and inclusive problem-solver to lead our UX Design community at Citizens Advice. You’ll lead a multi-level team of designers working across the organisation, collectively delivering a sustainable, user-led approach to advice. The team are at the heart of the organisation’s ambition to deliver our vision for 2022.
We’re growing fast, and today, we have 7 multidisciplinary product teams in our London office, split across four areas: public advice, adviser-facing services, platforms, and funded programmes.
You’ll lead interaction design across our products and services, tackling difficult design problems with technology, and working on things that really matter. You’ll collaborate with product leads, user researchers, designers, and developers to create simple, effective digital services. You’ll bring your team onboard with ideas, and coordinate design activities across multiple products to enable a clear and unified user experience.
You’ll be responsible for ensuring the right conditions and environment for designers to work effectively. You’ll set design direction, assure the quality of delivery across teams, and make sure we design with all users in mind. You’ll be an ally and mentor to other designers who will learn from your skills and experience.
Everyone is welcome at Citizens Advice. We care deeply about inclusive working practices and diverse teams. If you’d prefer to work flexibly, or part-time, we’ll facilitate this — whether to help you meet other commitments or to help you strike a great work-life balance. Several of our leadership team work 4 days a week, and we all work from home regularly.
What you’ll do every day
You’ll provide leadership and coaching to the UX design team, ensuring the team work collaboratively and consistently across all products and platforms. You will help us meet our mission by discovering new ways of approaching (and solving) complex problems and concepts, across the full breadth of product design.
You’ll come at an exciting time where you can make a huge impact and tackle the challenge of designing services that work across multiple channels, devices, browsers, and platforms. We’re re-platforming our underlying technology to be able to explore capabilities as voice, video, and self-service tools. This is a unique opportunity to experiment and innovate with new ways of meeting user needs.
You’ll be:
- leading a community of 7 interaction and graphic designers embedded in multidisciplinary product and platform teams
- collaborating with your leadership peers within product, delivery, user research, content design, and development to make sure our services are effective
- leading on accessibility and inclusive design for our products and services, all the way from a strategic level down to design details, and growing the skills of the team in this area
- guiding and mentoring your team in their work and career progression, helping them to set clear development goals, define their career paths, identify training needs, and do their best work
- finding, recruiting and on-boarding brilliant new designers at assistant, mid, and senior levels, including people from a broad range of design backgrounds
- defining and assuring the overall quality and strategy for product design in the organisation, finding opportunities for improvement, and developing strategies to better meet user needs
- representing us publicly in the ways that feel natural to you: writing, speaking, or running events in order to share what we do
- working with your design community to design and develop templates and patterns that enable clear, accessible, and consistent user journeys across different media
Apply if
- you’re passionate about Tech for Good and want to work in an equity-driven organisation solving complex problems
- you have significant experience of designing and improving both new and existing products in a large and complex organisation, including discovery, rapid prototyping (paper and digital), testing, and iteration
- you’re passionate about growing and hiring new leaders, developing designers’ skills and careers, and inspiring and motivating people to do their best work
- you value collaboration and are at your best when you’re part of a team, working closely with user researchers to understand if your designs work effectively, and pairing with front-end developers to implement design intent
- you’re comfortable making and guiding well-reasoned and effective design decisions, using data and qualitative and quantitative user research to guide concepts, iteration and optimisation
- you’re passionate about inclusive design and accessibility, and you’ll design with all our users in mind (not just the ones that look like our team)
- you have strong communication and presentation skills, and are fluent in explaining complex design decisions and implications to specialist and non-specialist audiences
- you embrace working in the open and enjoy sharing with other organisations, and you have the humility, adaptability and courage to try new things
- what we’re doing here at Citizens Advice excites you!
Interested? Know someone who might be?
Let’s have a chat! My DMs are open on Twitter, and you can also email me directly* to find out more.
I’m also holding space for open, informal video calls if you’d like to find out more about the role to help you decide if you want to apply:
- Monday 12th August 9am-1pm
- Thursday 15th August 10:30am — 4pm
To book a slot, email me with your preferred date and time. If you can’t make any of the above, drop me a note and we’ll figure out an alternative.
*No recruiters please. No, really.
