User Researcher

This role is available across our London, Bristol and Manchester locationsThe Government Digital Service (GDS) is the digital centre of government — we are responsible for setting, leading and delivering the vision for a modern digital government.Our priorities are to drive a modern digital government, by:joining up public sector servicesharnessing the power of AI for the public goodstrengthening and extending our digital and data public infrastructureelevating leadership and investing in talentfunding for outcomes and procuring for growth and innovationcommitting to transparency and driving accountabilityWe are home to the Incubator for Artificial Intelligence (I.AI), the world-leading GOV.UK and at the forefront of coordinating the UK’s geospatial strategy and activity. We lead the Government Digital and Data function and champion the work of digital teams across government.We’re part of the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT) and employ more than 1,000 people all over the UK, with hubs in Manchester, London and Bristol.The Government Digital Service is where talent translates into impact. From your first day, you’ll be working with some of the world’s most highly-skilled digital professionals, all contributing their knowledge to make change on a national scale.Join us for rewarding work that makes a difference across the UK. You'll solve some of the nation’s highest-priority digital challenges, helping millions of people access services they need.The Cyber and Domains Protection Team provide high quality relevant and actionable vulnerability, incident, threat and dependency information for the protection and resilience of the UK’s Public Sector’s digital services. We protect public sector domain name spaces such as “.gov.uk”, and ensure they remain stable, trusted, well managed and resistant to compromise. The team also helps protect the infrastructure tools and services associated with these domains.Job descriptionAs a User Researcher you’ll:engage with organisations across the public sector to help define and improve cyber security servicesplan, design and prepare a range of user research activities to support the design, development and continuous improvement of several servicesdeliver a wide range of user research activities from recruiting participants, preparing discussion guides and moderating research sessionsbe able to select and apply user research techniques that are appropriate to the contextcommunicate user research findings to help teams and the wider organisation develop a deep understanding of users and their needswork closely with subject matter experts to turn user research findings into stories and actions that lead to valuable improvementschampion user centred practices to drive greater user orientation across the team.collaborate with the wider user researcher community across government and share best practiceutilise your skills and expertise on other projects or other aspects of this project during your engagement should our organisation’s priorities changePerson specificationWe’re interested in people who:have broad experience of planning and conducting user research activities that span a large number of organisations or business units and presenting clear findings for your colleagues to usewill have applied knowledge of a range of qualitative and quantitative user research methods, and the ability to select appropriate approaches for different contextshave worked in multidisciplinary teams to deliver new services and involved your colleagues to include many kinds of users in appropriate research activitieshave experience of helping several service teams adopt user-centred service design and delivery practices and embed them into their agile workflowhave the ability to communicate complex research data into clear findings and insights and tailor them to the needs to various stakeholdershave an understanding of cyber security risk and government cyber security best practiceshave experience planning, designing and carrying out research activities according to the Service ManualPlease note that this role requires SC clearance, which would normally need 5 years’ UK residency in the past 5 years. This is not an absolute requirement, but supplementary checks may be needed where individuals have not lived in the UK for that period. This may mean your security clearance (and therefore your appointment) will take longer or, in some cases, not be possible.For meaningful checks to be carried out, you will need to have lived in the UK for a sufficient period of time, to enable appropriate checks to be carried out and produce a result which provides the required level of assurance. Whilst a lack of UK residency in itself is not necessarily a bar to a security clearance, and expectation of UK residency may range from 3 to 5 years. Failure to meet the residency requirements needed for the role may result in the withdrawal of provisional jobs offers.DSIT cannot offer Visa sponsorship to candidates through this campaign. DSIT holds a Visa sponsorship licence but this can only be used for certain roles and this campaign does not qualify