Senior User Researcher

The Role: Senior User Researcher

Contract Length: 6 Months

Rate: 650

As Senior User Researcher you will play a critical role in ensuring that AI tools and processes adopted under the Government Efficiency Accelerator meet the needs of civil servants and operational teams. Your insights will shape the design and delivery of AI-enabled solutions, helping government functions achieve meaningful efficiency gains while maintaining user trust and engagement.

Senior User Researcher:

• Plan, design, and deliver a range of user research activities to understand user needs, motivations, and pain points related to adopting AI tools and new ways of working.
• Carry out diverse user research activities, including participant recruitment, preparing discussion guides, conducting interviews and workshops, and analysing results.
• Work closely with policy experts, technology specialists, and delivery teams to ensure research findings directly inform design decisions, prototypes, and implementation plans.
• Communicate research findings clearly and persuasively to a variety of stakeholders, from delivery teams to senior leaders and ministers, to ensure user needs are at the centre of programme decisions.
• Champion user-centred design practices across the Government Efficiency Accelerator, helping teams adopt and embed research and service design approaches in their agile workflows.
• Lead colleagues in synthesising research findings into actionable insights and recommendations, turning them into impactful user stories that guide future development.
• Support the creation and refinement of a scalable AI implementation playbook based on research and user feedback.
• Contribute actively to the wider user research community across government by sharing knowledge and best practice, presenting at meetups, and writing about your work.

The Successful Candidate:

• Strong experience advocating for and delivering user research in complex programmes or across multiple teams, ideally in a government or large organisational context.
• Ability to understand and navigate the complexity of operational and policy functions, aligning research activities to strategic and delivery goals.
• Proven track record of introducing and embedding new research methods, and guiding teams to adopt user-centred design practices.
• Excellent communication and influencing skills, able to convey findings to both technical and non-technical audiences and senior stakeholders.
• Experience working in agile, iterative delivery environments and collaborating closely with designers, product managers, and technical teams.
• Strong analytical skills, able to synthesise qualitative and quantitative data into clear, actionable insights.
• Interest in or experience with AI, digital transformation, or process improvement in large organisations would be advantageous.
• Experience of working on a services throughout the full service lifecycle
• Experience of working in government, public sector or charity sector organisations
• Excellent planning and organisational skills