Senior Executive Officer User Researcher

Job Description

LocationSW1P 4DF, City of Westminster, LondonAbout the jobSummarySEO stands for Senior Executive Officer and is a grade within the Civil Service. The role is not to do with Search Engine Optimisation.Our new Energy Performance of Buildings certificate register team is already in beta development, having successfully passed an alpha assessment. The service allows citizen users to find existing energy performance certificates, which are necessary to lease or sell property, or arrange for an assessor to visit their property to create a new certificate. Our other users are internal civil servant users who access the data for statistical purposes, academic and other users who are interested in accessing the open data published through our service, and assessor schemes who send data to our service via an API. The new service will replaceJob descriptionWorking with a multidisciplinary team, you?ll help us develop a deep understanding of our users and test whether what we?re building will meet their needs. Your findings will allow the team to design and build better services and improve existing services based on data and evidence from our customers. The team is currently a mix of supplier and civil servants, moving towards a more civil-servant heavy team in public beta. MHCLG has built a strong user research community over the past few years. You?ll be supported by Senior User Researchers as well as the rest of your community and your team.ResponsibilitiesThe scope of your responsibilities: ? you?ll take responsibility for planning, designing and preparing a range of user research activities to support the design, development and continuous improvement of the service; ? youll conduct usability testing with a wide range of users, including users with accessibility requirements; ? you?ll analyse research data and identify actionable findings and outcomes which you?ll communicate with the digital and policy people you work with; ? we?ll expect you to deliver your research information through a combination of presentations at show and tells, stand-ups and wider team meetings, designing and maintaining research outputs on the team wall and creating formal reports; ? you will establish collaborative working practices with content designers, product managers and developers, turning your user research findings into stories and actions that lead to valuable service improvements and solutions. The person specification: We are looking for someone with the following skills, experience and knowledge: ? knowledge of a range of user research methods, techniques for analysis of research data, synthesis of findings and presentation of clear findings that are usable; ? experience planning and doing continuous user research in a multidisciplinary team will be essential, as will the experience of involving your team in research activities, analysis and synthesis; ? experience of being able to quickly understand the social and technological context of services; this will enable you to demonstrate how you have aligned your user research activities to help your team understand changing user behaviour; ? understanding of the diversity of users of government services and illustrate how you would include all kinds of users in appropriate research activities to help teams deliver accessible services. Desirable capabilities, skills and experience: ? some knowledge of current technologies used to build and operate digital services, and the different technical roles will be highly desirable; ? experience working on public service design, especially local public service design an advantage. ? Knowledge of WCAG 2.1 guidelinesBehavioursWell assess you against these behaviours during the selection process:

Making Effective Decisions

Working Together

Managing a Quality Service

BenefitsBenefitsTransfers across the Civil Service on or after 4 October 2018:Staff transferring from other government departments to a new PAYE scheme on any type of move other than TUPE/COSOP will lose their access to salary sacrifice for childcare. However, MHCLG do have childcare voucher scheme for under-5s and have a staff benefits scheme offering cycle to work and discounted shopping vouchers. For further information about the benefits available to MHCLG employees, please see the attached Candidate Pack.Things you need to knowSecuritySuccessful candidates must pass a disclosure and barring security check.Successful candidates must meet the security requirements before they can be appointed. The level of security needed is counter-terrorist check. Selection process details This vacancy is using Success Profiles, and will assess your Behaviours and Strengths. MHCLG want to bring in and bring on a diverse workforce at all levels. The application system is designed to remove as much bias as possible from the recruitment system ? this means that a hiring manager does not know your name, your details, see your whole application in one go (or have your CV at review stage unless stated otherwise). Your answers are randomised and chunked up. This means that each assessor views sets of responses to questions for example all candidates? responses to ?Seeing the Big Picture? rather than seeing a candidate?s full application. The science behind this is that recruitment can be subject to ordering and fatigue effects and we want to reduce this as much as possible. Most of our campaigns utilise multiple assessors and so it is possible that each of your answers would be viewed by different assessors. When writing your application, remember: ? that the assessor won?t be reading your answers sequentially. ? do not assume that the same assessors will have read all of your answers. ? If talking about something in your first answer, make sure that you write the second answer as if you had not written the first (and so on!) At sift, we will be assessing:? Technical - (Lead question) Describe a product you worked on as a user researcher. What research methods did you use to understand the users ? Making effective decisions - How do you turn research findings into actionable insights Please give an example of when you?ve done this and what the result was. ? Working together - Tell us about a time when you worked with a multidisciplinary agile team. How did you ensure that the team were aware of the research findings a