Senior User Researcher Department for Work & Pensions
Reference
47319
Number of vacancies
8
Location
Blackpool, Leeds, Manchester, Newcastle and London
Salary
£49,171 — Up to £64,656
Work hours
37 per week (flexible working)
Employment type
Permanent
Job benefits
We have a broad benefits package built around your work-life balance which includes:
• Flexible working
• Family friendly policies
• Volunteering and charitable giving
• Discounts and savings on shopping, fun days out and more
• Interest-free loans to buy a bike or a season ticket
• Sports and social activities
• Learning and development, including coaching, mentoring, qualifications and accreditation
• Career progression opportunities and lots
Closing date
6 August 2020
Job description
DWP. Digital with Purpose.
We’re looking for a talented User Researchers to join our growing community of experts. DWP is leading a once in a generation programme of welfare reform and you’ll help drive forward a key part of one of the biggest and highest-profile digital transformation programmes in the world.
DWP currently has an enormously ambitious and challenging agenda. We provide services and support to over 20 million people, and we make over 730 million benefit payment transactions each year.
Our digital transformation will radically improve how government interacts with people. We’ll make our services easier and swifter to access, the time taken to develop new services will be decreased and the cost of delivery will be reduced significantly.
And we put the user at the centre of everything we deliver.
Duties. Work. Projects.
You’re a practitioner who is capable of planning and leading user research activities across large and complex projects and services. You will be an expert in problem definition and selecting the appropriate research strategies to tackle issues and understand user needs.
You’ll be embedded in a multidisciplinary team, where you’ll be responsible for planning and carrying out user research activities. You’ll collaborate with other digital experts but you will also need to be able to work independently.
Championing a user-centred, evidence based approach to formulating strategy and vision, you will engage across the user research practice and across DWP’s digital project teams.
You will have management and coaching responsibilities. You’ll be able to our more junior researchers develop, building our capability and enabling quality research services and the growth of the user research community across the department.
By planning, designing and carrying out research activities, you will be helping teams get a deep understanding of the people that use government services. This research informs policy, proposition, service, content and interaction design so that services work well for users and achieves policy intent.
You’ll be responsible for communicating with users and championing core research principles to DWP and civil service colleagues. You have up-to-the-minute knowledge of research methods and tools, and you can use them to turn research insights into recommendations.
Testing both high level and specific aspects of a service, you will present research findings to help gain consensus and enable us to take the recommended actions.
You will also plan and conduct research that considers the diversity of users, keeping in mind access needs and research ethics.
What skills, knowledge and experience are we looking for?
For this role we welcome applications from those who can demonstrate that they have an understanding and experience of:
- basic user research methods. When to use those methods and how to apply them correctly.
- aligning user research activities to inform decision making and action.
- using quantitative and qualitative data about users to turn user focus into outcomes.
- applying Agile principles and tools in practice.
- identifying constraints and communicating these whilst challenging their validity, ensuring pre-defined standards are being met.
Where will you work?
You’ll join our team at one of our digital hubs in either Blackpool, Leeds, London, Manchester OR Newcastle.
We also all have the tech and tools we need to enable our people to work flexibly, and many of us are working remotely at the moment due to COVID-19.
We’re the UK’s biggest government department with over 80,000 diverse and brilliant people on our team. We are an equal opportunity employer and we welcome applications regardless of age, gender, race or sexuality.
CLICK APPLY for further information and to start an application on Civil Service Jobs.
If you have any questions of you want to discuss the role before you apply get in touch via danny.winch@dwp.gov.uk
Check out some tips for getting hired here at DWP Digital via here and also this link