Senior Interaction Designer

Apply before 11:55pm on Monday 18th August 2025

The Intellectual Property Office (IPO) is seeking a senior interaction designer to contribute to its digital transformation. This role involves designing user-centred public services at scale within multidisciplinary teams, aligning with Government Design Principles. Key responsibilities include identifying and resolving complex public infrastructure issues, promoting best practices and standards in user centred design, and mentoring junior designers. The successful candidate will be proactive, take ownership of design activities (like facilitating critiques and documenting user journeys), and possess excellent leadership, collaboration, presentation, and communication skills to work effectively with various stakeholders.

Find out more on our Design in Government blog.

Working Style

This role will be carried out in-line with IPO Hybrid working arrangements where staff are currently expected to spend at least 20% of their time working onsite from one of our offices. This role is based in our Newport Office.

The requirement for attendance at an office location can vary by role so we would encourage candidates to discuss working arrangements with the recruiting manager to agree a reasonable balance between working from home and the office.

Main duties consist of but are not limited to:

• Design and Develop User-Centred Services: Work in agile, multidisciplinary teams to rapidly develop design concepts for complex transformation programs, collaborating with service managers and programme directors. This includes actively participating in user research, creating prototypes, and designing user interactions across various channels, devices, and technologies, all while being able to justify design decisions with evidence and data.
• Promote and Implement Design Excellence: Champion a consistent, high-quality user experience by promoting reusable design elements and best practices across the IPO and wider government communities. This involves contributing to user-centred design standards and guidance, utilising the GOV.UK Design System, and ensuring designs meet accessibility, legal, and security requirements, as well as the GOV.UK Service Standard.
• Lead and Mentor Design Professionals: Provide management support, coaching, mentoring, and training to other designers (including HEO Interaction Designers), focusing on their development, the quality of their work, and ensuring adherence to best practices.

Essential Criteria

• Experience working effectively in an agile, multi-disciplinary team environment, delivering iterative design components as part of a project team.
• Experience in designing accessible solutions across various channels to meet customer needs. Proven ability to produce essential user-centred design deliverables, such as user flows, process flows, service blueprints, and site maps.
• Proficient in using prototyping tools like GOV.UK Prototype Kit, Figma, or Adobe XD to create and validate high-fidelity prototypes.
• Experience in conducting usability testing, either independently or collaboratively with user researchers.
• Demonstrated experience working with the GOV.UK Design System, Service Manual, and design principles, including the ability to recommend new patterns or update existing ones within the system.
• Experience in leading community of practice activities.
• Proven ability to mentor and coach designers across the UCD profession.

Benefits

Alongside your salary of £46,262, Intellectual Property Office contributes £13,402 towards you being a member of the Civil Service Defined Benefit Pension scheme. Find out what benefits a Civil Service Pension provides.

• Unlimited Pluralsight video learning access
• Access to Microsoft’s ESI training suite
• Hybrid working with no core hours
• Substantial support for career progression
• 25 days annual leave moving to 30 days in annual increments
• You will also get 8 days public leave and 1 day privilege leave

Additional details on security and vetting

Successful candidates must pass a disclosure and barring security check and if successful you must also hold, or be willing to obtain, a higher Security Clearance.

For meaningful checks to be carried out individuals will need to have lived in the UK for a sufficient period of time, depending on the level of clearance, to enable appropriate checks to be carried out and produce a result which provides the required level of assurance. For this role the successful individual will need to have consistently lived in the UK for a minimum 5 years in order to meet the relevant security clearance.