Head of User-Centred Design, Business Analysis & Quality Assurance

Job Description

• Starting salary: £62,428 pro rata, per year
• Contract type:
  Permanent
• Grade: 6
• Location:
  
  Longmore House, Edinburgh, EH9 1SH
• Working Hours:
  
  Monday - Friday, 35 hours per week
• Interviews:
  To be held in person at Longmore House on Tuesday 15th September 2026

This is a unique opportunity to shape a senior leadership role at Historic Environment. Head of User-Centred Design, Business Analysis & Quality Assurance. Reporting into the Head of Digital Transformation, you'll champion inclusive, user-first design across HES's services, embed rigorous business analysis into how the organisation plans and delivers change, and ensure quality is built in from the star. Define what integrated digital practice looks like at a national organisation with a rich and varied public mission - building capability, setting standards, and directly shaping how HES serves heritage professionals and the public alike.

For more information about the post and information about the team, please access the full job description for this post: _Head of UCD Job Description.docx. Please note that if you don't have Office 365 installed on your device, this can be opened using your browser.

• Enrolment onto a Civil Service Pension scheme - 28% employer contribution
• 25 days annual leave, pro-rata (increasing to 30 days after 3 years) + 11.5 public holidays
• Reimbursement for relevant professional subscriptions
• Support for further education and personal development
• Study leave for work related courses
• Flexible working hours (where appropriate)
• Free entry to all of our properties (with up to three guests)
• Free entry to English Heritage, Manx and Cadw properties

• Provide strategic and operational leadership across the UCD, Business Analysis, and Quality Assurance disciplines, ensuring each functions to a high professional standard
• Lead recruitment, performance management, and professional development, building capability and career pathways within each discipline
• Act as a senior peer within the digital/transformation leadership team, representing the combined interests and capacity needs
• Work collaboratively and in the open, educating colleagues in user-centred design and service design when necessary
• Guide, support and mentor other designers, setting clear objectives for UCD teams to ensure alignment with key Historic Scotland strategies, policies and goals

• Own demand and capacity planning ensuring resource is allocated effectively against organisational priorities
• Build and maintain the evidence base (data, benchmarks, tracking) needed to demonstrate capacity gaps and justify resourcing decisions to senior leadership

• Set overall design direction within the Directorate and wider organisation; shaping the service propositions and roadmaps, ensuring they contribute to the wider organisational objectives and strategic priorities
• work with the other Digital colleagues to create robust UCD structures and processes that support teams to deliver great services and develop a culture that enables user-centred design to flourish in HES
• Set and maintain consistent standards, methodologies, and ways of working across UCD, BA, and QA, ensuring quality and consistency of outputs across all projects
• Champion inclusive, user-first design principles across the organisation, embedding accessibility and equity into service design from the outset
• Ensure QA and testing practice is embedded early and consistently across the project lifecycle

• Build strong working relationships with other Heads of Service, Directors, and senior stakeholders
• Represent in governance forums, programme boards, and senior leadership discussions
• Act as an escalation point for risks, issues, or resourcing conflicts

• Report to the Head of Digital Transformation on team performance, capacity, risks, and progress against objectives and project milestones
• Ensure appropriate tracking and reporting mechanisms are in place to monitor demand, delivery, and quality across all three functions
• Embed inclusive, user-first design and consistent quality assurance practice across all HES digital and service delivery work
• Strengthen HES's overall digital delivery maturity by ensuring design, analysis, and quality assurance are integrated from the start of every project, not retrofitted
• Use evidence from research and data to inform product, service and management decisions, and use evidence to engage with senior stakeholders
• Provide evaluation and quality assurance of services, strategies and policies to ensure business requirements and user needs are being met, identify root causes for failure and find opportunities for reducing complexity and reducing cost

In order for you to be successful in this post, we will be looking for you to submit a cover letter which addresses how you can meet each of the…