Content Designer

Job description

Job responsibilities

At UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA) our mission is to prepare for, prevent and respond to infectious diseases and environmental hazards to keep all our communities safe, to save lives and protect livelihoods. We are a trusted source of advice to government and to the public, focusing on reducing inequalities in the way different communities experience and are impacted by threats to health.

This is an exciting opportunity to join UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA) as a Content Designer within the UCD Team.

About the team

The UCD team draws together experts in design and delivery with a shared mission to create an organisation that puts an understanding of users, their needs, and experiences at the heart of policy making, and service and product design and delivery, to improve organisational performance.

To achieve our mission, the UCD team will:

• Influence Advocate for user-centredness. Building awareness and understanding of UCD principles and practices across UKHSA, actively influencing decision makers to apply UCD standards and practicestopolicy making and service and product design and delivery.
• Enable Grow the UCD profession and give all staff the tools they need to embody user-centricity; providing a place for expert UCD capability to flourish, and the tools, guidance and frameworks needed toenable all staff to build UCD knowledge and skills.
• Deliver Deploy our expert capability to help the organisation to solve problems and improve products and services by bring a problem-focused user-centric approach to transformation initiatives.

The UCD delivery function will comprise multidisciplinary squads who will work collaboratively with teams across the agency to help shape product and service design, improve public health outcomes and address health equalities. Our delivery squads take on a varied portfolio of work, with much of our input being focused on the discovery and alpha stage. The squads have a broad understanding of the existing and developing digital and service landscape across UKHSA and play an important role in ensuring user needs are central to development of services.

As Content Designer you will be joining a team of 26 UCD professionals to support the delivery of these ambitious goals. Working as part of a multi-disciplinary team, you will support UKHSA to solve problems, embedding expert UCD practice within change and improvement activities, to drive lasting and transformative change for our users and supporting UKHSA in its objective to become a high performing organisation.

MAIN DUTIES AND RESPONSIBILITIES

1. Provide hands-on content design by working with other disciplines, stakeholders and customers to gain a deep understanding of user needs and creating content that works for our users - easy to navigate, clear to understand, visually engaging and accessible; whilst balancing operational, technical, legal and design constraints and requirements.
2. Drive awareness of content design practices, influencing project roadmaps to embed effective and user-centred design practice.
3. Create content assets to test ideas, communicating solutions with clarity and confidence to stakeholders to create actionable strategic insights and service improvements.
4. Contribute towards expanding and refining a central library of design assets and patterns to share best practice and bring the UKHSA content design strategy to life.
5. Influence and shape best in class digital and non-digital products and services; adopting inclusive UCD practices and ensuring findings from research and testing are applied to design and deliver effective and inclusive content, that meets government and NHS design, style and accessibility standards and industry best practice utilising peer reviews and critique processes to gather feedback and share best practice.
6. Be an advocate for the voice of users in the design of our services, identifying and communicating important user insight to stakeholders to ensure that we deliver effective, inclusive, and accessible services.
7. Be a champion for the user-centred design approach across the organisation, increasing the awareness of staff and stakeholders, fostering interest, and working openly and collaboratively whenever possible, investing in time to share learning and best practice with all members of the UCD Team and actively contributing to your community of practice.
8. Represent UKHSAs content design capability across government, NHS and the wider public health system, contributing to the cross-government and GDS communities of practice.

Please refer to the Job Description for a full list of Roles and Responsibilities.

The duties/responsibilities listed above describe the post as it is at present and is not intended to be exhaustive. The Job holder is expected to accept reasonable alterations and additional tasks of a similar level that may be necessary.

Selection process details

STAGE 1 - APPLICATION & SIFT:

You will be required to complete an application form and a statement of suitability. Your Statement of Suitability should outline your skills, experience, and achievements, providing evidence of your suitability for the role, against the essential criteria (outlined in the person specification section). Your Statement of Suitability must not exceed 750 words.

Important tip - please ensure that your cover letter includes how you meet the skills and experience listed in the person specification section above.

You will also be asked to provide information within the Employer/ Activity history section of the application form. This is equivalent to the information you would provide on a CV, setting out your career history. The sift selection panel will only consider relevant career history information from the last 5 years.

If you are successful at this stage, you will progress to an interview.

STAGE 2 INTERVIEW:

This stage include a 60 minute video interview. This will include giving your response to a typical Product Management scenario, to help us understand and ask about your product thinking. We will assess your experience of the priority DDaT skills and the three Behaviours set out below.

Depending on how many applications we get, there might also be an extra stage before the video interview, for example a phone interview or a technical exercise.

In the Civil Service, we useSuccess Profilesto evaluate your skills and ability. This gives us the best possible chance of finding the right person for the job, increases performance and improves diversity and inclusivity. Well be assessing your technical abilities, skills, experience and behaviours that are relevant to this role.

For this role well be assessing you against the followingCivil Service Behaviours:

• changing and improving
• making effective decisions
• delivering at pace
• communicating and influencing

Well also be assessing your experience and specialist technical skills against the following skills defined in the Digital, Data and Technology Profession Capability Framework for theContent Designerrole:

• agile working
• content concepts and prototyping
• stakeholder relationship management
• user focus
• strategic thinking
• user centred content design

Candidates should expect questions on the initial 3-4 skills during the interview.

Candidates that do not pass the interview but have demonstrated an acceptable standard may be considered for similar roles at a lower grade.

A reserve list will be held for a period of 12 months, from which further appointments can be made.

We are an equal opportunity employer and value diversity at our company. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, colour, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, age, marital status or disability status.

Feedback will only be provided if you attend an interview or assessment.

Expected Timeline: TBC

Advert close: 23:55hrs on 07/01/2023 unfortunately, late applications will not be considered. Once this job has closed, the job advert will no longer be available. You may want to save a copy for your records.

Interviews: TBC

Please note these dates could be subject to change.

Eligibility Criteria

Open to all external applicants (anyone) from outside the Civil Service (including by definition internal applicants)

Nationality requirements

Appointments to roles within UKHSA will be made in accordance with the Civil Service nationality rules. These can be found athttps://www.gov.uk/government/publications/nationality-rulesThis job is broadly open to the following groups:

• UK nationals
• Nationals of Commonwealth countries who have the right to work in the UK
• Nationals of the Republic of Ireland
• Nationals from the EU, EEA or Switzerland with settled or pre-settled status or who apply for either status by the deadline of theEuropean Union Settlement Scheme (EUSS)
• Relevant EU, EEA, Swiss or Turkish nationals working in the Civil Service
• Relevant EU, EEA, Swiss or Turkish nationals who have built up the right to work in the Civil Service
• Certain family members of the relevant EU, EEA, Swiss or Turkish nationals

We recruit by merit on the basis of fair and open competition, as outlined in the Civil Service Commission's Recruitment Principles.

The Civil Service embraces diversity and promotes equal opportunities. As such, we run a Disability Confident Scheme (DCS) for candidates with disabilities who meet the minimum selection criteria.

The Civil Service welcomes applications from people who have recently left prison or have an unspent conviction. Read more about prison leaver recruitment.

Person Specification

Qualifications and Education

Essential

• Experience of content design and using user-centred design methods and practices with a good understanding of the key standards in assuring quality content design and able to demonstrate adherence to these
• Understanding of best practices in content design and how to embed them into an agile workflow and influence project roadmaps to deliver timely outputs
• Able to build and manage relationships with a variety of internal and external stakeholders with different reporting relationships and work with them in a collaborative and co-creative manner to improve services and gain support for assets, content strategies, design concepts, solutions, roadmaps, and ways of working
• Experience making complex language and processes easy to understand
• Experience of explaining design ideas and concepts in a way that other people understand; with the ability to identify the right medium to communicate
• Experience working with user researchers to interpret findings and insights and use them to design and iterate content across multiple digital and non-digital channels
• Able to select and use appropriate design tools and methods to collaboratively explore problems and identify opportunities
• Able to rapidly design and test content assets for both digital and non-digital channels using a range of techniques to understand whether solutions will meet user needs
• Knowledge of agile ways of working, and experience working with user researchers, service and interaction designers and other professions
• Knowledge of the barriers to access which affect engagement with content, able to demonstrate the importance of designing inclusive, equitable, accessible, and sustainable public services, with understanding of best in class in inclusive content design

Desirable

• Experience of a service you have designed receiving a service assessment against the government service standard, or experience as a lead or design service assessor
• Some experience in conducting basic user research e.g. user interviews and usability testing

Disclosure and Barring Service Check

This post is subject to the Rehabilitation of Offenders Act (Exceptions Order) 1975 and as such it will be necessary for a submission for Disclosure to be made to the Disclosure and Barring Service (formerly known as CRB) to check for any previous criminal convictions.

Certificate of Sponsorship

Applications from job seekers who require current Skilled worker sponsorship to work in the UK are welcome and will be considered alongside all other applications. For further information visit the UK Visas and Immigration website (Opens in a new tab).

From 6 April 2017, skilled worker applicants, applying for entry clearance into the UK, have had to present a criminal record certificate from each country they have resided continuously or cumulatively for 12 months or more in the past 10 years. Adult dependants (over 18 years old) are also subject to this requirement. Guidance can be found here Criminal records checks for overseas applicants (Opens in a new tab).

Employer details

Employer name

UK Health Security Agency

Address

Remote/Hybrid

London, Birmingham, Leeds, Liverpool

NW9 5EQ

Employer's website

https://www.gov.uk/government/organisations/uk-health-security-agency (Opens in a new tab)