Senior Interaction Designer
£65,000 per annum
Bedford
Permanent
Hybrid Working
Join us at the Money and Pensions Service (MaPS) as a Senior Interaction Designer. As a Senior Interaction Designer at Money and Pensions Service (MaPS), you will be responsible for improving engagement, customer satisfaction and ultimately the financial wellbeing of millions of people across the UK, particularly those with vulnerabilities.
Working within a multi-disciplinary team, you will use your interaction design skills to ensure our digital products and services are desirable, effective, usable, accessible and inclusive.
You will also work with the rest of UCD team to champion and evolve the practice of user centred design at MaPS and align it with the GDS Service Standard.
Your design skills and experience will help MaPS achieve our mission of helping everyone in the UK make the most of their money and pensions.
This role is aligned with DDaT Senior interaction designer - https://www.gov.uk/guidance/interaction-designer#senior-interaction-designer
We don’t require a portfolio, but if you have one we’d love to see it. If not, we’d like a short statement (up to 500 words - less is fine) highlighting specific projects or experience which demonstrate the skills and abilities in this job description.
You will be leading the design of a service which helps people, including those with vulnerabilities, use complicated financial information to take positive action. So we are especially interested in examples which involve one or more of:
- Making difficult information accessible and compelling to non-experts
- A large, content-heavy website
- Working to the GDS service standard
- Working for a public sector organisation
- Working in a financial services or other regulated environment
Key Responsibilities:
- Leading workshops, reviews, critiques and handovers.
- Helping evolve and champion the interaction design practice within MaPS.
- Building interaction design capacity within a multi-functional team by sharing insights, principles and best practices with non-designers.
- Collaborating with a cross functional team to implement the user experience vision for MaPS’s digital channels.
- Advising and teaching colleagues of all levels in your areas of special expertise.
- Helping internal colleagues and external delivery partners define and evolve agile ways of working.
- Identifying, understanding and mitigating the ways design decisions and processes may negatively impact users, especially those who are vulnerable or experience some form of exclusion.
- Working with Business Analysts, Policy and Proposition Managers, and Product Managers to understand business requirements and ensure they are addressed in your designs.
- Collaborating with relevant internal teams to ensure our services meet MaPS, DWP and GDS standards for suitability, efficacy, usability, accessibility, quality, security and data protection.
- Building prototypes for testing and review.
- Identifying and prioritising design assumptions.
- Helping user researchers to plan research to gain the insights needed to advance the design.
- Working with user researchers and performance analysts to use analytics, customer feedback and other internal and external data to identify areas for improvement and inform designs.
- Conducting user experience audits, heuristic evaluations, competitive reviews and other desk research.
- Creating and socialising experience maps, process flows and other design artefacts to understand and communicate the customer journey.
- Creating design documentation and assets including sketches, wireframes, low and high-fidelity prototypes, sitemaps & specification documents.
- Helping Product Owners, Policy and Proposition Managers, and Omnichannel Analysts define KPIs and measure the success of our website against them
- Performing design quality assurance on the final delivered product or service.
Essential:
- Solid interaction design experience (likely to be 5 years or more). Some of this may have been in an adjacent role, such as graphic or UI design, frontend development, product management or customer– or academic research.
- Comfortable working on projects with several stakeholders in a complex, matrix organisation.
- Experience working in a multi-disciplinary scrum team, ideally in an organisation employing SAFe principles.
- Experience creating and maintaining a design roadmap based on the overall product roadmap.
- Able to balance project work with initiatives to improve the practice of interaction design at MaPS.
- Experience with Figma, Miro, and Adobe Creative Cloud or equivalent tools.
- Experience designing to meet WCAG 2.2 Level AA accessibility guidelines.
- A basic understanding of accessible, cross-browser front-end development to inform high quality, implementable solutions.
- Experience with mobile-first, responsive website design.
- Experience of working with content rich and/or data-intensive websites, ideally for a consumer audience.
- Experience in the public sector or other regulated field (e.g. financial services, medicine, law).
About Us
The Money and Pensions Service (MaPS) is based in Bedford, in a recently renovated modern office. This is a wonderful opportunity for you to become an integral part of a dynamic organisation, working to help people across the UK.
At the heart of the Money and Pensions Service are our values – caring, connecting, and transforming, which are the foundation of our success. They permeate every area of our work and define all our business relationships and the way we work with each other. We’re not only looking for the best people to come and work for us, but we need people who align themselves with our values:
- Caring
We care about our colleagues and the people whose lives we are here to transform.
- Connecting
We will transform lives through our ability to make positive connections.
- Transforming
We are committed to transforming lives and making a positive societal impact.
Our Inclusive Working Environment
By fostering our values, we are immensely proud of the inclusive working environment that we have created. The diversity of our people is a strength that we embrace and wish to build upon, so we are committed to attracting people of all backgrounds. We work hard to ensure that we have a progressive approach to inclusion, equity, and belonging. We really do want our colleagues to “bring their whole selves to work.”
Our colleague and ally networks encompass LGBTQ+, neurodiversity, women’s health, men’s health, ethnicity, and diversity.
What We Offer
- Generous Annual Leave – 30 days plus Bank Holidays
- Pension scheme – contributions matched 2 to 1 (employer contribution up to 10% of your salary)
- Interest-free loan for season tickets for buses and trains
- Cycle to work Scheme
- Subsidised eye tests & flu jabs
- Life assurance scheme
- Give as you earn scheme
- Employee assistance programme (EAP)
- PAM Assist and PAM Life scheme (Wellbeing)
- Enhanced family and sick pay
- Paid volunteering (2 days a year)
- Recognition Scheme
- Discounts portal to numerous retailers
Flexible Working
At MaPS, we take pride in our flexible approach to work. As standard, we work on a hybrid basis with a minimum of 2 days in the office per month. Hybrid working is a voluntary, non-contractual arrangement and our headquarters in Bedford will be your contractual place of work. The number of days that anyone will be able to work at home will be determined primarily by business needs, but personal and other relevant circumstances will also be considered. If you are successful, any opportunities for hybrid working, including whether a hybrid working arrangement is suitable for you, will be discussed with you prior to you taking up your post.
Recruitment Process:
- Initial Review: Our recruiter will review your CV. If it looks like a good fit, they'll reach out to arrange a call.
- Hiring Manager Review: If the recruiter thinks you're suitable, your CV will be passed to the hiring manager, who will decide whether to invite you for an interview.
- Interview: If selected, you'll participate in a virtual interview. This single-stage process allows you to demonstrate your skills and experience through competency-based questions. This will also require you to deliver a short presentation.
Career Development
In MaPS, we take career development seriously. We actively encourage and support applications from our existing MaPS colleagues. However, we do follow the Civil Service Commissioner recruitment principles, which means that you will be required to participate in a full, open, and fair process.
Reserve List
If you are successful at interview, we operate a reserve list where your details will be held for up to 6 months. Should a vacancy come available in that time with the same essential criteria, reserve list candidates will be offered that position with no further assessment required.
Application Process
The law requires that selection for appointment to the Civil Service is on merit on the basis of fair and open competition as outlined in the Civil Service Commission’s Recruitment Principles. If you feel your application has not been treated in accordance with the Recruitment Principles, and you wish to make a complaint, in the first instance, you should contact the Money and Pensions Service via email: [email protected]. If you are not satisfied with the response you receive from the Department, you can contact the Civil Service Commission: Visit the Civil Service Commission website.
Job Reference: MaPS01226
Close Date: 12/7/2026
