Senior Service Designer and User Centred Design Practitioner

Job summary

Health Innovation Manchester is seeking a driven, adaptable and collaborative Senior Service Designer & User Centred Design Practitioner to help deliver meaningful healthcare innovation. This is an exciting opportunity to shape innovation programmes, ensuring the needs, experiences and perspectives of users are at the centre of designing and delivering solutions that improve health and care outcomes.

About the Role

You’ll play a key role in shaping the future of health and care innovation across Greater Manchester. Working across a diverse portfolio of programmes, you’ll lead service design, user research, co-design and service improvement activities to ensure services, pathways and innovations are designed around the needs of the people who use them.

This is a varied and influential role combining hands-on delivery with leadership and function development. You may be facilitating co-design workshops with patients, clinicians or community partners, analysing service pathways, developing service blueprints, supporting innovation implementation, or presenting recommendations to senior stakeholders. Using evidence, insight and creativity, you’ll tackle complex challenges and help translate ambition into practical, deliverable solutions.

This role is based at Health Innovation Manchester, an innovation network organisation hosted by Manchester University NHS Foundation Trust. Learn more about our work:https://healthinnovationmanchester.com/

Main duties of the job

You’ll thrive here if you’re passionate about understanding people’s needs and turning insight into action. You’re someone who enjoys working with complexity, bringing together different perspectives and helping teams make sense of challenges in a way that leads to meaningful improvement.

You’ll be equally comfortable facilitating a co-design workshop, leading a service redesign project, mentoring colleagues or presenting recommendations to senior stakeholders. You’ll have the confidence to work independently, the judgement to navigate ambiguity and the interpersonal skills to bring people together around a shared vision for change.

As a senior member of the User Centred Design team, you’ll support and develop colleagues, champion high-quality practice and help strengthen our organisational capability in user research, service design, co-production and engagement. You’ll act as a trusted partner to programme teams, providing expert advice and helping ensure that decisions are informed by evidence, insight and lived experience.

Above all, you’ll be motivated by creating better outcomes for patients, communities and the health and care workforce, ensuring that accessibility, inclusion and user-centred thinking are embedded in everything we do.

Person Specification

Knowledge and Skills

Essential

• Strong understanding of UCD disciplines and capabilities, including user research, service design, business analysis, participatory design, co-production
• Skilled in selecting and applying appropriate UCD methods to complex service challenges.
• Strong facilitation skills, including the ability to manage sensitive, contentious or emotionally charged discussions.
• Ability to communicate complex information clearly, sensitively and effectively to a range of audiences.
• Ability to identify and apply creative solutions to the representation and communication of complex information and to the delivery of engagement activity.
• Ability to synthesise research, engagement and data insights to form evidence-based recommendations.
• Strong analytical skills, with the ability to interpret qualitative and quantitative data.
• Ability to work autonomously, manage competing priorities and meet deadlines.
• Strong interpersonal skills with the ability to build effective working relationships across disciplines and organisations.
• Knowledge of accessibility standards, inclusive design and approaches to reducing health inequalities.
• Experienced in presenting to large audiences with barriers to understanding due to language barriers, cultural differences, beliefs, or health conditions.
• Ability to produce high-quality written outputs, visual artefacts and presentations.
• Strong attention to detail, with proven capability to operate at detail and strategic level in response to contextual need

Desirable

• Knowledge of NHS service models, operational pathways, commissioning and digital transformation context.
• Understanding of ethics, safeguarding and governance requirements relating to public engagement and research.

Experience

Essential

• Senior level experience in planning and delivering user research, service design or co-design activity in complex organisations (health, public sector or similarly regulated environment).
• Significant experience leading service discovery, service redesign or implementation modelling activities
• Experience in communicating and modelling ways of working or changes to procedure and practice.
• Experience working with NHS, UK public sector, health innovation networks, or similar health innovation ecosystems.
• Track record of delivering high-quality UCD artefacts such as blueprints, user journeys, research insights and service models.
• Experience of leading large-scale UCD activity in a complex organisation or ecosystem.
• Experience in managing or coordinating multidisciplinary teams.
• Experience of working as a UCD Practitioner in a multidisciplinary project setting
• Experience working with clinical, operational, health system or public service colleagues to redesign services or pathways.
• Experience facilitating workshops, engagement sessions and collaborative design activities.
• Experience applying inclusive, accessible and equitable design approaches.
• Experience balancing multiple projects, deadlines and competing priorities.
• Experience supporting public engagement, PPIE or community-based co-production activity.

Desirable

• Experience working within the NHS or health and social care system.
• Experience applying national standards, policies or regulatory frameworks within service models (e.g., NHS England, NICE, CQC).
• Demonstrable awareness of NHS systems, data flows and coding requirements

Qualifications

Essential

• Educated to master’s degree level or equivalent professional experience in a relevant field (service design, user research, business analysis, human factors, social sciences, health services research, etc.).
• Postgraduate qualification or equivalent professional experience in a relevant field (service design, user research, business analysis, human factors, social sciences, or other health services research).
• Training or significant experience in user research, service design, business analysis, systems thinking or related UCD methodologies.
• Evidence of continuous professional development relevant to UCD practice.

Desirable

• Professional certification linked to service design or user research; business analysis; research or evaluation; change, transformation or delivery; coaching or facilitation.

Closing Date: 9 August 2026