Digital Service Designer

Job Title: Digital Service Designer

Location: Hybrid, based in Harrisburg, PA candidates will go onsite 1-3 days per week

Job Description

RESPONSIBILITIES

A hands-on digital service-design practitioner who can conduct user and stakeholder research, map complex end to-end services, connect the user experience to underlying processes, data, systems, policies, and organizational handoffs, synthesize evidence, and translate findings into actionable service improvements.

Service designer/researcher who can investigate why the overall service is difficult, determine whether the cause is the user experience, process, policy, data, system, or organizational handoff, and help define the future-state service.

The Digital Service Designer will apply User-Centered Design (UCD), Human-Centered Design (HCD), user research, and service-design methods to understand how users experience a service across multiple processes, systems, data sources, policies, and organizational boundaries. Working within the discovery framework established by the Director of Digital Discovery, this role will conduct hands-on research, develop current-state and future-state service artifacts, synthesize evidence, identify opportunities for improvement, and help translate discovery findings into actionable recommendations and a prioritized roadmap.

• Plan and conduct qualitative research with external users, internal stakeholders, subject matter experts, and program representatives.
• Develop research plans, interview guides, discussion guides, workshop materials, and research questions.
• Conduct:
  • User interviews
  • Stakeholder interviews
  • Contextual inquiry
  • Discovery workshops
  • Journey-mapping sessions
  • Assumption and concept validation
• Support participant segmentation and sampling strategies.
• Document user needs, goals, behaviors, pain points, barriers, workarounds, and unmet needs.
• Maintain traceability between research evidence and resulting findings or recommendations.

Service Design & Journey Analysis

• Map end-to-end user experiences across the complete digital service.
• Create and maintain:
  • User journey maps
  • Service blueprints
  • Experience maps
  • Process maps
  • User stories
  • Pain-point maps
  • Opportunity maps
• Connect the front-stage user experience to the supporting:
  • Business processes
  • People and roles
  • Policies
  • Data
  • Systems
  • Integrations
  • Organizational ownership
• Identify where service friction originates and distinguish between UX, process, policy, data, technology, and governance issues.
• Identify duplicated activities, unnecessary handoffs, inconsistent experiences, and opportunities to simplify the service.

Research Synthesis & Recommendations

• Analyze qualitative research to identify themes, patterns, contradictions, evidence gaps, and opportunities.
• Participate in collaborative synthesis sessions.
• Distinguish among:
  • Validated findings
  • Assumptions
  • Hypotheses
  • Conflicting evidence
  • Outstanding questions
• Translate findings into clearly articulated opportunity statements.
• Contribute to prioritization based on user impact, business value, evidence strength, complexity, dependencies, risk, and feasibility.
• Develop decision-ready findings and recommendations for program and executive stakeholders.
• Contribute to the prioritized roadmap and future-state service vision.
• Work within the discovery methodology, governance model, and evidence standards established by the Director of Digital Discovery.
• Maintain research artifacts and contribute questions, hypotheses, risks, assumptions, and evidence gaps to the discovery backlog.
• Participate in discovery planning, synthesis sessions, learning reviews, backlog refinement, and stakeholder readouts.
• Evaluate existing discovery artifacts before recommending additional research.
• Recommend changes to discovery priorities when supported by new evidence.

REQUIRED QUALIFICATIONS

• 5+ years of professional experience in service design, UCD, HCD, UX research, design research, digital service discovery, or related digital-transformation work.
• Demonstrated experience performing hands-on qualitative user research.
• Demonstrated experience applying UCD/HCD methods to complex digital services
• Strong experience developing:
  • Journey maps
  • Service blueprints
  • Process maps
  • User stories
  • Research findings
  • Opportunity statements
  • Recommendations
• Experience conducting and facilitating user and stakeholder interviews.
• Experience facilitating discovery workshops and collaborative synthesis sessions.
• Demonstrated ability to analyze qualitative information and identify meaningful themes and patterns.
• Experience connecting user needs to underlying processes, systems, data, policies, and organizational responsibilities.
• Experience translating research findings into actionable recommendations.
• Experience working within Agile, iterative, or digital-discovery environments.
• Ability to communicate research findings to both technical and nontechnical audiences.

Desired Qualifications:

• Government or public-sector digital services experience.
• Experience researching services used by external customers, suppliers, businesses, residents, or other public users.
• Experience with complex transactional services such as:
  • Procurement
  • Supplier/vendor registration
  • Certification
  • Licensing
  • Grants
  • Payments
  • Benefits
  • ERP-enabled services
• Experience working across multiple agencies, departments, systems, or organizational owners.
• Plain-language or content-design experience.
• Experience conducting inclusive research with users representing different business sizes, digital capabilities, accessibility needs, and levels of familiarity with government processes.