About the job

Summary

At HMRC we are committed to creating a great place to work for all our colleagues; an inclusive and respectful environment that reflects the diversity of the society we serve.

We want to maximise the potential of everyone who chooses to work for us and we offer a range of flexible working patterns and support to make a fulfilling career at HMRC accessible to you.

Diverse perspectives and experiences are critical to our success and we welcome applications from all people from all backgrounds with the experience and skills needed to perform this role.

We’re making HMRC’s services and information simpler, clearer and faster for individuals and businesses. To do that, we are looking for User Researchers who are passionate about User Centred Design, supporting the work of our Policy Lab team.

HMRC’s Policy Lab has developed a strong reputation for helping policy makers shape some of HMRC’s biggest and most impactful policy changes since 2018, this includes shaping new taxes, helping our policy teams understand when something won’t work for customers or evolving existing policies to help make it easier for customers to meet their tax obligations.

This is an exciting time to join an organisation that probably doesn’t work how you’d imagine a government organisation would. HMRC’s Policy Lab truly enables you to have an impact at significant scale, directly influencing senior leaders and government officials with your evidence and design ideas.

Like to know more about what we do? Get in contact for a chat.

Job description

As a HMRC User Researcher, you will have the unique opportunity to work in HMRC’s Policy Lab, this will give you the opportunity to work on services that matter and affect the lives of millions of citizens. Our Policy Lab team works directly with policy specialists to help shape some of HMRC’s biggest and most challenging or transformative policy ideas/options, which lead to user centred public services.

Our aim is to help policy makers shape policy that makes it easier for people to meet their obligations and for government to maximise efficiency. Your role is to ensure that user needs are intrinsic to the design and implementation of our policies and services.

You will join a lively and supportive User Research community, with access to research labs and facilities across the UK.

Our team are passionate and committed to conducting robust research with real-world impact, and bring varied expertise from the private, voluntary, and public sectors.

Responsibilities

As a User Researcher in our team, you will be:

• Planning, designing, preparing and executing a range of user research activities to support the design, development and continuous improvement of government policies and services.

• Identifying the appropriate research method depending on the phase of the service lifecycle, such as ethnographic research methods, usability testing and A/B tests.

• Ensure research plans take all ethical considerations into account and appropriate mitigating actions are in place.

• Working closely with a multidisciplinary agile scrum team who are passionate about their work, and ensure research has a significant contribution to the delivery of our services.

• Leading colleagues to analyse research data and synthesise clear and actionable findings, including working closely with analytics colleagues to create a rich picture of user behaviour.

• Communicating user research findings to help the team and wider organisation develop a deep understanding of users and their needs including presentations at show and tells, designing and maintaining research outputs on the team wall, creating formal reports.

• Contributing to the wider user research community including presenting at meetups and writing blog posts.

• Mentoring and managing junior user researchers.

Essential criteria

You should demonstrate proven experience in:

• Understanding and using a range of user centred service design and delivery practices.

• The ability to understand what problem your team is trying to solve and align user research activities to inform decision making and action.

• Conducting user research projects with demonstrated impact on the final user experience.

• Using a range of quantitative and qualitative methodologies including ethnographic techniques, usability testing, remote testing, and survey design to identify user needs.

• A good understanding of the diversity of users of government services, and the ability to conduct inclusive research.

• Synthesising multiple inputs (reporting data, metrics, qualitative and quantitative insights) to generate actionable and implementable recommendations.

• Involving teams and stakeholders in analysis and synthesis to increase consensus and challenge assumptions.

• Meeting ambitious deadlines and delivering high-quality work on schedule, including quickly turning around research plans and outputs in different formats.

• Presenting clear findings to stakeholders to demonstrate the impact of the research, so that colleagues can understand and use it appropriately.

• Working in an open, iterative and collaborative way in a multidisciplinary scrum team.

It’s desirable that you have:

• Understanding of agile approaches and experience of working in agile teams.

• Some knowledge of current technologies used to build and operate digital services, and the different technical roles in a digital team.

• Understanding of the GDS Service Manual & Government Digital Standard.

• Knowledge or experience of working in an agile delivery environment.

• A degree in psychology, cognitive science, human factors, computer science, product/interaction design, human computer interaction or related disciplines or relevant experience.

Ideally you will also have experience in conducting research:

• With people with low digital skills.

• With people with accessibility needs.

• With diverse and hard-to-reach audiences.

Behaviours

We'll assess you against these behaviours during the selection process:

• Changing and Improving

Technical skills

We'll assess you against these technical skills during the selection process:

• DDaT Capability Framework Skill – Research skills
• DDaT Capability Framework Skill – Analysis and synthesis
• DDaT Capability Framework Skill – User centred and Agile practices