Service Designer / UX Designer (Public Sector)

📍 Job Overview

Job Title: Service Designer / UX Designer (Public Sector)

Company: Version 1

Location: Dublin, Ireland

Job Type: Full-time

Category: Service Design / UX Design (Public Sector Focus)

Date Posted: 2026-07-28

Experience Level: Mid-Level (4+ years)

Remote Status: Hybrid

🚀 Role Summary

• This role is a hybrid of Service Design and UX Design, with a primary emphasis on Service Design principles and practices within a public sector context.

• The position requires a strong ability to understand user needs, conduct comprehensive research, and translate findings into actionable service design solutions.

• Key responsibilities include facilitating stakeholder engagement, designing end-to-end services, and driving continuous improvement of user-centred services.

• The successful candidate will be instrumental in service transformation initiatives, ensuring services are accessible, evidence-based, and aligned with organizational objectives.

📝 Enhancement Note: The job description explicitly states 'Service Designer first, UX Designer second', indicating a strategic prioritization for service-level thinking and transformation over purely digital interface design. This suggests the role will heavily involve understanding systemic service delivery and user journeys across multiple touchpoints rather than focusing solely on UI/UX for a specific digital product. The public sector context implies a need for navigating complex stakeholder landscapes and adhering to stringent accessibility and governance requirements.

📈 Primary Responsibilities

• Lead and deliver end-to-end service design projects, from initial problem definition through to implementation and ongoing optimization.

• Apply service design methodologies to map and analyze current-state and future-state service experiences, creating essential artefacts like service blueprints, customer journey maps, and ecosystem maps.

• Design and improve services by adopting user-centred and evidence-based approaches, ensuring they meet the needs of citizens, customers, and internal users.

• Support and drive service transformation initiatives within complex public sector organizational structures, translating user, business, operational, and technical requirements into practical design solutions.

• Plan and execute a variety of qualitative and quantitative user research activities, including user interviews, field research, observation studies, workshops, and surveys, to gather deep customer and user insights.

• Analyze and synthesize research findings into actionable insights and clear recommendations, producing comprehensive reports and presentations for diverse stakeholder groups.

• Create essential design artefacts such as personas, user stories, user flows, information architecture, low-fidelity and high-fidelity wireframes, and interactive prototypes.

• Facilitate workshops, design sprints, discovery sessions, and co-creation activities to foster collaboration and drive consensus among multidisciplinary teams, including senior stakeholders, subject matter experts, and delivery teams.

• Ensure all designed services adhere to Universal Design principles and meet stringent accessibility requirements and inclusive design standards, incorporating accessibility testing and validation throughout the project lifecycle.

• Contribute to the development and maintenance of design systems, standards, and style guides to ensure consistency across products, services, and channels.

• Utilize AI tools to enhance user research, insight generation, service design activities, content synthesis, and design exploration, while ensuring responsible and compliant usage.

• Support the development of service performance measures and monitoring approaches, using user feedback, analytics, and research to inform iterative service improvements and demonstrate measurable outcomes.

• Promote user-centred design practices and capability building within teams and the wider organization, potentially through coaching and mentoring junior designers.

📝 Enhancement Note: The responsibilities are heavily weighted towards strategic service design, research, and transformation, as indicated by the emphasis on "Service Design first, UX Design second." The explicit mention of AI tools in service design suggests a forward-thinking approach. The requirement to "Promote user-centred design practices" and "Support capability building" points to a role that not only executes design but also champions its adoption.

🎓 Skills & Qualifications

Education:

• Design-related qualification at NFQ Level 7 or above (or equivalent) as a minimum requirement.

• Bachelor's degree is expected, aligning with the NFQ Level 7 requirement. Experience:

• Minimum of 4+ years of progressive experience in Service Design or a closely related discipline, such as UX Design, Interaction Design, Human-Computer Interaction (HCI), Organisation Design, Product Design, or User-Centred Design.

• Proven experience in delivering end-to-end service design projects, encompassing discovery, design, implementation, and ongoing optimization phases.

• Demonstrated experience working within structured project and delivery environments, likely in public sector or large enterprise settings.

• Experience in conducting comprehensive user research, including in-depth user interviews, field research, survey design and analysis, qualitative and quantitative usability testing, and synthesizing findings into actionable reports.

• Proficiency in creating key service design and UX artefacts such as customer journey maps, service blueprints, personas, storyboards, user stories, user flows, wireframes, and interactive prototypes.

• Experience in gathering and documenting detailed user, business, and operational requirements.

• Proven ability to facilitate workshops, co-creation sessions, discovery sessions, and design sprints effectively with diverse groups.

• Experience utilizing design and collaboration tools such as Figma, Miro, and Canva.

• Experience contributing to the development and maintenance of design systems and style guides.

• Strong command of written, verbal, and visual communication skills, essential for stakeholder engagement and design articulation.

• Demonstrated experience working collaboratively with multidisciplinary teams and effectively engaging with senior stakeholders.

• Solid knowledge of Universal Design Principles, the Web Accessibility Directive, and best practices in accessible service design. Required Skills:

• Service Design Methodologies: Deep understanding and practical application of service design principles, tools