Mobile Courant

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Senior Service Designer

Starting Salary: $64,000 - $84,000 (Depending on qualifications and experience)

The City of Mobile seeks a Senior Service Designer for its newly created Office of Strategic Initiatives (OSI). This office was formed from the sustained result of a Bloomberg Philanthropies grant-funded Innovation Team, carrying ties to the Bloomberg global network of pioneering civic innovators.

OSI is a small, multi-disciplinary team charged with researching challenges, working with city staff to create solutions, implementing performance management, and driving human-centered design innovation across all City departments. The team is committed to achieving a nimble local government that continuously aims to be as frictionless a platform as possible for all staff and citizens. We are an internal creative and strategic resource, reporting directly to the Mayor and the Chief of Staff with city-service efficiency, effectiveness, and experience measures of success. Past 'Innovation Team' work found at osi.cityofmobile.org serves as an example of capability rather than expectation. Future team methods and outputs are adjusting, and the designer will have a role in shaping this.

Alongside the Director and Data Analyst, the Service Designer will play a critical role in conceptualizing, facilitating/conducting, and reporting on design-based innovation to support departments in service delivery improvements. The ideal candidate will have a strong background in service design methodology, including research, synthesis, idea generation, prototyping, testing, and measurement. In a visual, written, and traceable way, they will collect, analyze, and deliver insight into complex systems formatted for internal and external audiences. A part of this will be translating department/citizen needs to the City’s Information Technology department and advising in the adaptation of existing software. The chosen candidate will be expected to develop relationships, trust, and influence with city staff by exhibiting approachability, good communication, and helpfulness. With a hands-on, patient, and practical approach, the designer will work with people at their pace, capability, and vocabulary levels. This position is recently vacated by the now acting director, thus training, guidance, and support will be available. However, the designer should come with a desire and ability to learn new skills independently.

Interested candidates should submit a resume, a one-page cover letter, and a digital portfolio/visual sample of work (link acceptable). Portfolios should demonstrate professional and/or conceptual project/thinking processes, informational graphics/displays, and storytelling.

Specific Duties & Responsibilities:

Conduct qualitative research to gain insight into citizen motivations, needs, and experiences relating to internal processes and procedures. This research includes but is not limited to the following methods:

• City-wide & Targeted Surveys
• 1 on 1 & Group Information Gathering
• Community & Staff workshops
• Service Observation / Documentation
• Grounded Theory & Affinity Diagramming Synthesis
• Stakeholder & Influence Mapping
• Process Mapping & Improvement

Produce various research-based graphics, presentations, and documents such as:

• Citizen Personas & Journey Maps
• Visual and Narrative Storytelling
• Procedural and Training Materials

Build, manage, and report on city-wide measurement surveys for each service touch-point utilizing a combination of software:

• Survey Monkey
• Alchemer

Facilitate department and cross-departmental workshops mapping business processes and relating them to citizen research and city software capabilities:

• In-person white-boarding
• Online (Miro) white-boarding

Support departments in service delivery software implementation and development

• Build Monday.com boards with strategic intent
• Utilize research to inform the design and redesign of city systems
• Identify new technologies to fulfill need gaps

Support departments with internal collaborative cultural discovery, definition, and relation to actions throughout the organizational hierarchy

• Vision, Mission, Goal, Objective, Measurement setting

Minimum Qualifications (Mandatory):

• Bachelor’s Degree and/or relevant practical experience in human-centered design, collaborative solution creation, visual communication, and implementation advisement skill sets. Example fields: Industrial Design, Service Design, Experience Design, Instructional Design, System Design, Business Leadership, Product / Service Line Ownership, Strategic Consultation, etc. Example experience: Product or Service Research & Development, Business Strategy Conceptualization & Implementation, Repeated application of processes that take a project of any kind from research to final product, etc.
• Two years of professional level experience in a relevant field
• Knowledge of design-based innovation methodologies, including the ability to determine when and how to use specific approaches, frameworks, deliverables, and facilitation methods
• Demonstrated ability to conduct user research and translate results into insights
• Demonstrated ability to display large amounts of information in simple, easy-to-understand formats
• Ability to work both independently and cooperatively within a team, leveraging other team member work and abilities
• Ability to work on multiple projects concurrently within Gantt-style planning
• A commitment to a collegial workplace

Preferred Qualifications:

• Four years of experience or more preferred
• Demonstrated ability to learn various intuitive, modern technologies such as Miro.com, Monday.com, Microsoft 365 Suite, Kumu
• Strong desire to improve local government for the sake of all its citizens with resistance to politically motivated bias and agendas
• Strong interpersonal skills with an ability to build good relationships with teammates, staff, and diverse community stakeholders.
• Demonstrated ability to understand, communicate about, and visualize complex systems with real-world constraints
• Demonstrated experience applying human-centered design frameworks to past projects resulting in practical solutions and impactful outcomes
• A clear understanding of the types of challenges municipal governments typically face is preferred, either through direct experience working in government or in organizations that collaborate closely with governments

Special Knowledge, Skills & Abilities:

• Excellent documentation, synthesis, and summarizing skills
• High resilience and patience in working with people of varying levels of interest in human-centered design and innovation
• Strong research-based visual content creation, paired with strong verbal and written communication skills
• Proficiency in Adobe Creative Suite: Illustrator, InDesign, and Acrobat
• Superior organizational skills and ability to set priorities and respond quickly as priorities change
• Confidence in being able to understand general aspects of enterprise-level service-request/work-order management software such as Nexgen and Rocksolid

Work Schedule / Environment:

• Monday – Friday, 8 AM - 5 PM
• Rare occasions of before/after-hours work will be needed to capture certain research opportunities
• Two weeks of paid vacation with a one-week increase after two years
• At-home work is permitted so long as deliverables are met and no in-office needs are present. However, employees must be able to get to the office in a reasonable amount of time if the need arises
• Office Location: 205 Government St. Mobile, AL 36602

Educational Opportunities:

Educational travel, conference, and training opportunities may be requested with reasonable justifications and outcomes. Budgetary constraints apply.

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