Principal User Researcher
| Posting date: | 30 May 2025 |
|---|---|
| Salary: | £73,900 to £85,690 per year |
| Additional salary information: | New entrants to the Civil Service will start their role on the salary band minimum: £73,900 for National Roles. £77,900 for London Roles. Recruitment Retention Allowance (RRA): Up to £9,000 is available for candidates who demonstrate exceptional skills a |
| Hours: | Full time |
| Closing date: | 12 June 2025 |
| Location: | Sheffield |
| Company: | Government Recruitment Service |
| Job type: | Permanent |
| Job reference: | 408380/3 |
Summary
As Principal User Researcher, you will lead by example, managing discoveries in PPPT to ensure that products begin in the right way. You will work directly with policy teams to understand what they need and help them to understand how excellent User Centred Design can have a huge impact.
You will work on relationships that enable discoveries to move to the next stage – whether the findings are adopted by policy teams or developed in the Alpha stage.
You will bring an understanding of technology to the team and practical experience of delivering modern services in a complex environment. Alongside the Lead User Researcher and Lead Service Designer, you will support joined up services and delivery.
The Home Office Government Digital and Data directorate designs, builds and develops services for the rest of the department and for government. Every year our systems support up to 3 million visa applications, checks on 100 million border crossings, up to 8 million passport applications and deliver 140 million police checks on people, vehicles and property.
As a principal user researcher, you’ll work on challenging problems that require an understanding of complex services and systems, and their wider context.
As part of your practice as a user researcher, you will focus on defining a strategic approach and ensuring delivery quality.
You will be part of a project team and will work with colleagues to:
- Understand the problem space.
- Embed UCD standards in the way that discoveries are run, ensuring that discoveries build the best possible foundations for effective decision making.
- Champion user needs and seek opportunities to meet these at all levels.
- Resolve conflict between user research and organisational aims.
- Promote the benefits of user-centred design.
You will be expected to lead and assure the UCD work of the discovery team and provide guidance on best practice.
You will raise awareness of good user research across the Home Office and wider government user research community.
What you will do
Your main day to day responsibilities will be:
- Facilitating activities that help teams and stakeholders define and understand the problem space.
- Ensuring that delivery teams are unified around user needs, and progressing on the basis on a shared understanding of users.
- Ensuring that research reaches participants from the full range of user groups.
- Planning and managing how user research is done, working with other disciplines to ensure effort and activity are aligned and impactful.
- Establishing an effective UCD culture within the discoveries team, and connecting it to UCD culture across PPPT.
- Persuading stakeholders of the value of user research, helping them to align with UCD, and supporting them to understand digital delivery.
- Building the UCD profession within the discoveries team.
- Assuring the quality of user research activities and outputs, both as a lead practitioner, a mentor, and an assessor.
- Managing other user researchers, including setting goals, conducting performance reviews and mentoring junior members of staff.
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