User Centred Design Practitioners

📋 Description

• • Join a landmark, multi-year health and care transformation programme that will directly shape how millions of citizens interact with critical public services. Your user-centred design craft will be applied at national scale, influencing policy, technology, and frontline delivery across hospitals, GP surgeries, mental-health providers and social-care teams.
• • Work shoulder-to-shoulder with clinicians, policy leads, analysts and delivery teams in one of the largest digital health programmes ever undertaken in the UK. You will embed evidence-based, human-centred practices into every stage of the product lifecycle—from discovery through live service—ensuring that accessibility, safety and trust are never afterthoughts.
• • Operate in truly multidisciplinary squads that blend service design, user research, content design, interaction design, behavioural science and organisational design. You will co-create service blueprints, journey maps, interaction patterns and content standards that are reused by dozens of product teams, creating coherence for patients, carers and staff alike.
• • Lead or contribute to generative and evaluative research that surfaces the lived experiences of seldom-heard groups—carers, people with learning disabilities, refugees, older adults—translating rich insight into actionable design hypotheses. You will run contextual interviews, diary studies, usability tests and surveys in sensitive, ethical ways, feeding evidence directly into sprint goals and ministerial briefings.
• • Translate complex clinical pathways and regulatory requirements into simple, inclusive digital and offline touchpoints. Whether you are mapping an end-to-end cancer referral journey, redesigning outpatient letters, or prototyping a consent flow for genomic data sharing, you will balance user needs with clinical safety, data security and legislative constraints.
• • Champion the adoption of the GOV.UK Service Standard and NHS Digital Service Manual across new and legacy products, ensuring every interaction meets WCAG 2.2 AA, uses plain English and supports assistive technologies. You will pair with developers and testers to embed accessibility acceptance criteria and run regular audits with disabled user panels.
• • Facilitate design critiques, show-and-tells and cross-government design huddles to raise the bar for UCD maturity across the wider public sector. You will mentor junior practitioners, run brown-bag sessions on topics such as trauma-informed design, and contribute reusable patterns to the NHS and GOV.UK design libraries.
• • Influence strategic decisions at programme-board level by presenting clear, compelling evidence that links user outcomes to financial, clinical and policy KPIs. Your artefacts—service maps, ROI models, behavioural hypotheses—will be used to unlock £multi-million funding gates and shape national policy consultations.
• • Work in a fully remote-first environment, supported by quarterly in-person design sprints held in Leeds, London or Manchester. You will collaborate across time zones with colleagues in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, using Miro, Figma, Slack and Jira to maintain transparency and asynchronous decision-making.
• • Enjoy a rare level of autonomy and creative freedom within the stability of a permanent or fixed-term public-sector contract. You will have protected time for professional development, access to a generous training budget, and the option to rotate across different health domains (mental health, elective care, screening, population health) to broaden your impact and expertise.