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Interaction Designer

We’re looking to grow our design team in Sheffield and need great people who can understand how people interact with services and design great experiences for them.

Applications are now closed

Being an interaction designer at Paper involves working out how someone might interact with the services we work on. You’ll be an important aspect of the service design process championing usability, accessibility and iterative design.

You’ll be working on services which have differing levels of interaction. Sometimes you’ll be looking at entire journeys people navigate, sometimes you’ll be looking at the individual components which make up those journeys.

Good interaction design is invisible and the people who use our services should be able to get things done without having to work out how an interface or journey works. You’ll be central to ensuring that happens.

What the job is

We’re interested in meeting people with different levels of experience. You don’t need to have interaction design on your CV to apply for this role. Some people call themselves UX/product designers. If you relate to the description above please consider applying, or having a chat with us before you do.

Our design teams have a range of capabilities and you’ll be working with the different design disciplines throughout your project work. You’ll also be working closely with the research team to test Paper’s work and to maintain high standards and to meet user needs.

Our most recent example of a large service design project was working with the DfE to design a new service to help schools save money when buying things such as catering services. It involved simplifying a complex user journey for people who work in schools by:

  • Understanding the needs of School Business Professionals who buy things for their school
  • Working out the questions our service would need to ask users
  • Designing the journeys which allow a school to specify what it needs to buy
  • Simplifying and demystifying the process of specifying their schools requirements
  • Prototyping in code to show the team and stakeholders how the journey might look on gov.uk
  • Working with the research team to understand usability issues
  • Designing and making use of interaction patterns

Core skills of any designer at Paper:

Paper defines three levels of capability with all our specialisms and this role is open to:

  • Learners. You may be learning about the role and about the individual capabilities required.
  • Practitioners. You have existing experience in the role and are repeatedly practising individual capabilities.
  • Specialists. You’re refining and leading your expertise to specialise in this role and within individual capabilities.

You’ll need some of the following capabilities (with varying levels of learning, practising and specialising within each):

  • An understanding of how user journeys are designed
  • Able to think strategically how something is designed, used and integrated within a service and an organisation
  • Facilitation skills to enable processes such as co-design or facilitated workshops
  • A good understanding of how development, design and research co-exist
  • Able to work with other disciplines such as content or service design
  • A good communicator of design decisions with transparent principles
  • A good understanding of what co-design means and its value
  • Able to design usable experiences and able to validate usability
  • Can work to high standards of digital accessibility and access needs
  • Have a good understanding of technology and design constraints
  • Able to use existing patterns and contribute to them

Nice to have experience

This experience isn’t necessary to apply for the role (and doesn’t apply to those learning) but do let us know if you have any experience with:

  • Prototyping in code
  • Research or service design
  • Central government or local authority
  • Working on large services, or services with complex requirements/needs
  • Working with policy teams, governance and or processes

Core capabilities you will develop while at Paper

Everyone who joins Paper is given the opportunity to develop core capabilities which cover being part of a business. We’re a company who values shared commitment, transparency and autonomy. You’ll be given the opportunity to develop skills in:

  • Working on our sales qualification process and facilitating sales opportunities
  • Helping Paper find new partners and freelancers
  • Understanding and applying our principles to the work we do
  • Working on R&D projects to further develop your capabilities and our capabilities as an organisation
  • Prioritising and managing your work
  • Presenting and documenting work

Salary and benefits

We offer 25 days of holidays.

Salaries for the role start at £25,000 for those learning and increase to £45,000 for practising (depending on experience and capability). You also get a £1,200 annual training budget.

Parental leave

We also have what we believe is a leading parental leave policy which includes 3 months full pay during your parental leave.

We worked with Pregnant then Screwed and Gendering Change to design it to be inclusive and cover more than the standards set out by the government. We understand family is important and we want you to not feel under pressure at an important moment in your life.

You get time to work on research and development (R&D), and third sector

We encourage our team to experiment on project ideas which further our collective thinking. These might be things we don’t get to try on projects or an idea which you’ve been thinking about for a while. You can use the people and resources of Paper to develop that further.

In your contract you’ll be given protected time to work on things which aren’t billable (typically 1 day per week depending on projects). Our R&D pipeline has a wealth of opportunities to learn and experiment (and you can bring your own, and contractually you own those ideas), while our principles (2 and 3) encourage Paper to work on third sector projects too (which we invest in heavily, to diversify our opportunity to learn).

We encourage a flat structure and are self organised

We have 3 directors, who guide and represent Paper, but we don’t like to think of them as bosses. We don’t have a management team and everyone who works at Paper has shared responsibilities, a shared backlog (sales, tasks, marketing, ways of working etc) and is self organised.

We value how we treat people

One of our R&D projects developed a code of conduct to share how we expect to treat people, and how we expect to be treated. We created this to encourage diversity and inclusivity at Paper and with our clients.

We do sensible things

We’re a flexible employer, who understands life is more than just work. If you need to start work late, that’s cool. If you need to work from home, that’s cool too. What, there’s one day you need to work around in December because the bank holidays fall weird? We might as well just have the day off (unless you really do want something to do!).

We’re proud of our flexible working

The studio

Paper is designed to be a happy place to work, we’re not perfect but we work hard to improve things every day.

The past 18 months has shown we can work remotely. This position can be remote too, but we do still want to meet up as a team when it’s safe to do so at our studio in Sheffield. If you’re ok with some travel to Sheffield (and client sites when it’s safe and needed), but want to work remotely otherwise, this is for you.

Our studio has been created as a collaborative work space. From various spots to perch (sofa’s, high tops, hot desks or plug in to a monitor) to quiet spaces to work. It’s a space called Kollider which has a variety of facilities along with hip places to eat as we’re right above Kommune. It’s also a ten minute walk from the train station.

In addition to the studio our flexible working policy allows you to work where you are best placed. Whether that’s on a client site, at home, or from the studio, we encourage a healthy mix of environments.

Paper also does a lot of work with government organisations which require us to perform DBS checks for everyone who works for and with us. We often work with vulnerable people, children and schools and will perform an enhanced DBS check as a condition of any job offer we make you. If you have any concerns you can speak to us confidentially and without judgement.


What’s it like to work at Paper?

We work hard to make Paper a great place to work. We’re an honest and transparent group of people and are guided by our principles. We’re not here to be a bum on a seat, we’re here to make a difference. We’re not “yes people”. We’re realists and we work hard to make things the best they can be.

Diversity and opportunity

We are an equal opportunity employer and diversity is very important to us as a business both in the work we do and the people we work with. We encourage you to get in touch no matter what.

We’ve been working recently with Diverse & Equal and Dr Muna Abdi of MA Education Consultancy to get advice on how our organisation can think beyond our privileged understanding of personal and systemic racism and reflect on the biases we might have and display ourselves.

Our team attends anti-racism training to continue to learn about improving diversity in our industry.

Summary

Capability level
Learning to Practising
Salary
£25,000 to £45,000
Holiday
25 days plus bank holidays
Training budget
£1,200
Closing date
17/11/2021

How to apply

Please send us whatever you feel is necessary to help us understand your experience and skill set. A CV isn’t essential, we’re open to creative responses.

Applications are now closed.