User Experience Design Lead (6 month fixed term contract)

Strategic design role leading across a major programme

OVO Energy Field Force, Bristol or London

OVO exists to power human progress with clean and affordable energy for everyone. Our user experience community is growing and we’re seeking someone to lead research and design for the team building new tools to coordinate and support our UK network of field engineers.

Our aim is to help people better manage their energy usage and support the UK’s drive to reduce carbon emissions. This means offering products which help our customers improve their homes’ energy efficiency. Our Field Force business includes hundreds of smart meter installers who visit homes to install hardware like smart meters and IoT energy devices, as well as the scheduling staff who plan and manage their workloads.

We have an ambitious goal of installing a million smart meters in 2021. And as we continue to grow, these devices will enable us to meet our bold target of a carbon neutral business by 2030. To achieve this we need to increase our installs per day, minimise failed installs, and optimise our route planning. We’re launching our new system soon and rolling out to hundreds of colleagues; we’ll then need to gather, understand, and prioritise feedback and issues to inform what we do next.

We’re building the future of our business and we’ve a lot to do. We have teams building a web application for our office-based schedulers, and a mobile solution for our engineers. You’ll lead a small team of designers embedded in the delivery teams, and coordinate ways of working, our research programme, the service and interaction design, and help the team always ask “are we building the right thing?”

This role can be based in Bristol or London, and you’ll collaborate with people across Europe. Learn more at careers.ovo.com and Glassdoor. We were delighted to win our 3rd Top Employers award, uSwitch's Supplier of the Year, and Company of the Decade.

Diverse teams are the best teams. Only when we represent everyone, can we build services for everyone. We’re keen to meet people with varied backgrounds: the more inclusive we are the better our work will be. We understand some people may not apply to jobs unless they tick every box. And we know 'normal' office hours don't work for everyone, so we're open to discussing flexible working requests. If you're excited about joining us and think you have much of what we're looking for, even if you're not 100% sure… we'd love to hear from you.

Your objectives

• design and build internal tools so we can offer a better service to our customers
• establish a culture of continuous research and experimentation to inform our strategy
• demonstrate a rapid and collaborative design process which involves the team and users
• help evolve our lean discovery and delivery process in a fast-paced environment
• champion research, accessibility, and usability across technologies and contexts of use

What you’ll be doing

First three months

• immerse yourself in the energy industry and our market landscape – be curious!
• meet our field engineers and support staff to understand their biggest frustrations 
• spend time with our designers to understand how best to support and grow them
• plan and lead workshops to bring people together and build shared understanding
• get to know your new team, and connect with our wider research and design community

Within six months

• take a leading role in the team’s daily design and delivery work, and coach iteration
• work closely with our Product Lead to inform the team’s roadmap and backlog
• collaborate with everyone to improve ways of working and shipping valuable software
• help expand our programme of research: everything from discovery to usability testing
• involve everyone in a culture of collaborative research, design, and testing

You’ll love working with us if you...

• have a passion for understanding real people’s real problems, and an abiliy to coach the people you work with not to jump to solutions too quickly
• have a critical thinking process and enjoy studying problems to puzzle out the challenges
• recognise assumptions (including your own) and seek ways to try and invalidate them
• have a diverse and evolving toolbox of methods and techniques for visualising problems, user journeys, and interactions, as well as for developing and testing solution
• are empathetic with colleagues as well as customers, especially when you’re communicating research findings, explaining the rationale behind a design, or questioning ways of working
• know your strengths, and recognise there’s always more to learn from others
• embrace agility and iteration, and celebrate learning and change

When you join OVO Field Force, you’ll join our OVO-wide community of 60+ researchers and designers. We help teams see through the eyes of real people—understanding their context, motivations, and needs—so we can improve things for everyone.

We use whatever methods and media best suit the challenge, and inform strategic choices about where improvements could have the greatest impact. We love design workshops, exciting colleagues about service design, improving our accessibility, and putting participants first in our research; check out all our blogs. We fall in love with the problem, not our solutions.

— — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — —

OVO’s here to challenge the status quo: to do what’s right, find a better way, and build something great. We embrace simplicity, transparency, and treating people and planet fairly. We understand that attracting and keeping the best talent is key to our forward-thinking future, so our people will always share in our success. Our benefits are nice too.

We want to build teams which represent a variety of backgrounds, perspectives, and skills, and we hire on the basis of merit and potential. So get in touch, ask lots of questions.