Lead User Researcher

In this role you will lead the user research community in the HRA's journey to develop its digital services.

The Digital Directorate is modernising and transforming the business, ensuring the user is at the heart of everything; including the delivery of business solutions using agile methods in a continuous delivery environment.

You will be an active leader based in one of our offices or from home, with occasional travel for face‑to‑face meetings. Working under general direction and within a clear framework of accountability you will exercise substantial personal responsibility and autonomy to meet objectives and delivery time frames, as well as providing leadership across the directorate.

Demonstrating excellent communication skills, influencing across multiple groups and partners, you will form a deep understanding of wider customer and organisational needs, participating in both internal and external activities to keep your skills up to date. With a clear ability to rationalise complex technical information, you will transform this to ensure it is understandable for others to work with.

Engaging with stakeholders, you will facilitate collaborative approaches to prioritise requirements and deliver key user insights to constantly improve the design of services; demonstrating a proactive approach to alignment with Government service standards, so that optimum outputs and solutions are delivered to meet user needs, organisational objectives and policy intent.

• Develop and assure good user research practices.
• Identify, capture and implement user needs.
• Implement service strategy with sound research to enable excellent service design.
• Provide guidance across projects on user research methodologies and GDS standards.
• Represent user research at service standard assessments.
• Determine user research standards, policies, user testing plans, roadmaps and vision.
• Manage user data in a secure way.
• Manage user research ethics processes.
• Ensure teams take a user centred, evidence‑based approach to service design.
• Consider accessibility and additional needs for inclusive design.
• Combine user research and analytics to improve user experience.
• Communicate the benefits of UI design, user testing tools, methods and standards to technical/non‑technical stakeholders.
• Evaluate research and design proposals from suppliers and make recommendations.
• Work across multiple services and lead User Centred Design (UCD) professionals to set direction.
• Interpret strategy and translate emerging trends which might impact or benefit the organisation.
• Draw together and present reasonable conclusions from a wide range of incomplete and complex evidence and data.
• Manage the user research function within the UCD team.
• Support the user research team to maintain focus on delivery, whilst instilling the importance of professional development and learning.
• Coach and lead teams in UCD principles.
• Onboard new staff within the team.

At the HRA, we are committed to fostering a supportive and inclusive working environment where we actively invest in the development and empowerment of our staff, enabling them to perform at their best. We strive to promote a healthy workplace culture where wellbeing, collaboration, and professional growth are valued and encouraged.

Working at the HRA, we support flexible working, recognising that home based or hybrid arrangements provides us with the most productive environment to work well. Where possible, we'll offer a working pattern that suits you.

The HRA offers home based contracts for all locations. Newcastle, Manchester and Nottingham based staff can be office based and hybrid working arrangements are also possible. We encourage you to speak with us to explore how this could be accommodated.

We are committed to creating an inclusive workplace that promotes and values diversity. We know from experience that different ideas, perspectives and backgrounds create a stronger, more creative workplace that helps us to deliver the best services. We welcome applications which represent the rich diversity of our community: age, disability, gender identity and expression, ethnicity, religion or belief, sex,…