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| # SFIA Role Guidance: Senior Designer | |
| - [SFIA Level 4: Enable](https://sfia-online.org/en/sfia-7/responsibilities/level-4) | |
| - [Job description](../senior_designer.md) | |
| ## Summary of role | |
| Our Senior Designers are strong practitioners who work with minimal support and can influence and mentor others to design and deliver public services. They do this by setting the direction, assuring the quality of design delivery within a team working on a complicated and large scale service. They are vocal and visible contributors to a healthy user-centred design (UCD) community and culture at Made Tech. | |
| ## Required competency for the role | |
| ### Autonomy | |
| * Works under general direction from Lead Designers and UCD Principals within a clear idea of what they are accountable for delivering. | |
| * Exercises substantial personal responsibility and autonomy for delivering quality work on time and assisting others in their team. | |
| * Plans own design to meet given team goals and ways of working." | |
| #### Examples of behaviour and responsibilities | |
| _Below are examples of behaviours and responsibilities a person in this role might be expected to demonstrate. The list is provided for illustrative purposes only._ | |
| - Takes ownership for user research happening regularly. Works to involve teammates in planning, conducting and analysing user research sessions. | |
| - Takes accountability for creating and regularly updating team prototypes. | |
| - Works with team to understand why key ideas are being tested. | |
| - Documents prototypes changes and versions after each round of research for transparency and trust. | |
| - Works within their team to create an efficient design process for testing ideas little and often. | |
| - Owns and advocates for the usability and accessibility of design work going to production. | |
| - Works closely with engineers to ensure major usability and accessibility issues within the team's control are addressed. | |
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| ### Influence | |
| * Drives team towards good quality design by influencing their whole team to work on the useful problems in a suitable way. | |
| * Mentors non-designers in their teams about design techniques and approaches. Line managing a small number of mid and junior designers. | |
| * Participates in external activities related to design. | |
| * Makes design decisions that influence the success of the project and team goals. | |
| * Collaborates regularly with teammates and service users. | |
| * Engages to ensure that user needs are being met throughout. | |
| #### Examples of behaviour and responsibilities | |
| Below are examples of behaviours and responsibilities a person in this role might be expected to demonstrate. The list is provided for illustrative purposes only. | |
| - Line managers designer new to Made Tech and public sector. Coaches them where to spend energy and what stuff to compromise on. | |
| - Presents clearly and confidently the design decisions at the start of each sprint to the whole team. Making it clear what hypotheses the prototypes are trying to prove or disprove. | |
| - Regularly pairs with other disciplines in their team such as software engineers. Able to see when this is needed to move work forward and show the value of working closely together like this. | |
| - Prototypes key features to form part of a minimal viable service a team can ship as its first release. | |
| - Interprets what is most valuable to users and feasible given the current systems being users. | |
| - Advocates for the user consistently and regularly in and outside the team. Pushing for design changes that will have the most important while actually possible to deliver quickly. | |
| - Breaks a service down into features that can be delivered incrementally while still delivering value for users and outcomes for the client organisation. | |
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| ### Complexity | |
| Leads service design within their team. Investigates, defines and resolves complex design problems within a service. Remove and add features to make simple services that can be delivered quickly and improved upon with real user feedback. | |
| #### Examples of behaviour and responsibilities | |
| _Below are examples of behaviours and responsibilities a person in this role might be expected to demonstrate. The list is provided for illustrative purposes only._ | |
| - Translates a paper form into prototype flow of pages, breaking down information into logical steps and tasks. | |
| - Audits existing design of a service. Identifies opportunities for consolidation and removal of design features. Where to apply gov.uk design patterns and components. | |
| - Working with a content designer to turn a new government policy into prototypes to test with users | |
| - Prototypes three different ways to potentially solve the same problem for a user task | |
| - Visualises a complex user journey of an existing service to improve team discussion | |
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| ### Knowledge | |
| * Has a thorough understanding of different design techniques and ways of working. Can either quickly apply their own design knowledge to the public sector or have personal experience to draw upon. | |
| * Gained a thorough knowledge of the domain of a client organisation. | |
| * Applies knowledge effectively in unfamiliar situations and actively maintains own knowledge and contributes to the development of others. | |
| * Rapidly absorbs new information about a problem space and its users and applies it effectively. | |
| * Maintains an awareness of developing design practices and their application and takes responsibility for driving own personal growth. | |
| #### Examples of behaviour and responsibilities | |
| _Below are examples of behaviours and responsibilities a person in this role might be expected to demonstrate. The list is provided for illustrative purposes only._ | |
| - Thorough understanding of GOV.UK Design System and why it’s needed. Keeps to design components wherever possible and understand the team time needed to create a new component. | |
| - Explain their role as a designer in the different GDS service design stages. Can advise a client or team how to get the best value out of their time. | |
| - Reads around the wider context of their teams work, be that client blog posts, ministerial announcements or news about a new policy. Can communicate the policy intent behind the work and how it relates to what a design needs to achieve. | |
| - Suggests activities and tools to their team for designing a service with fewer berries for people with disabilities and other access needs. | |
| - Attends events relating to public sector design or user research. Share learnings with the wider community of practice at Made Tech about what ideas from the idea might copying and trialling. | |
| - Trials a new design technique from another organisation in their own team. Evaluate how effective the tool is and shares learning with the wider community of practice. | |
| - Decides what is the most effective way to test an idea, be that a paper prototype or A/B test. | |
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| ### Business Skills | |
| - Communicates fluently, orally and in writing, and can present complex information to both design and non-design audiences. | |
| - Plans, schedules and monitors work to meet time and quality expectations. | |
| - Facilitates collaboration between stakeholders who share common objectives. | |
| - Selects appropriately from applicable design standards, methods, tools and applications. | |
| #### Examples of behaviours and responsibilities | |
| _Below are examples of behaviours and responsibilities a person in this role might be expected to demonstrate. The list is provided for illustrative purposes only._ | |
| - Blogs clearly about ideas that have been tested. Communicates what work (and didn't) and why. | |
| - Manages own time to get prototype work ready for testing with users. Is able to fit in other responsibilities like line management without it affecting their team's ability to learn and deliver value. | |
| - Facilitates a workshop with their team and some stakeholders to show how the different steps of a service might fit together. Is able to hold and move on conversations and visualise team thinking in artefacts like user journeys. | |
| - Advise on prototype techniques that make the most sense for a team’s ideas and hypotheses to test. | |