User Researcher, HEO, FTC 12 Months. Liverpool/ Newport

Job summary

Do you want your User Research skills to make a real difference?

If you’re motivated by meaningful work, eager to champion user needs, and ready to help elevate our User Experience practice, join us in shaping services that genuinely lift the load for the volunteers, trustees, and employees at the heart of the charity sector.

We are looking for a user researcher to play a pivotal role in designing the next generation of Charity Commission services.

In this role, you’ll help shape and refine research approaches that reveal opportunities to improve our systems, simplify complex journeys, and enhance how people experience our services.

You will:

• Generate clear, evidence‑based insights into user needs, behaviours and pain points, ensuring our products and services are grounded in real user experiences rather than assumptions.
• Translate research findings into practical, actionable recommendations that inform design and product decisions, influence roadmaps, and help teams prioritise the changes that deliver the greatest value for users.
• Champion the voice of the user across the organisation, fostering empathy, promoting user‑centred thinking, and ensuring user needs remain central throughout the design and delivery process.
• Strengthen the quality and consistency of research practice, choosing appropriate methods, ensuring research is robust and ethical, and continually improving how we work to support better decision‑making.

Job description

The main things you will be doing are:

• Planning and running user research that delivers real insight, using the right methods, involving your multidisciplinary team, and turning findings into clear, actionable guidance.
• Embedding research into agile delivery, working closely with designers, product managers and developers to support iterative design and ensure user needs drive each stage of development.
• Championing inclusive research, ensuring a diverse range of users take part in studies and helping create services that are accessible and usable for everyone.
• Strengthening our research practice, defining the scope of studies, applying good standards, seeking guidance when needed, and continually improving how we work.
• Building strong relationships with stakeholders, communicating research effectively, influencing decisions with evidence, and helping align organisational priorities with user needs.

Person specification

Key skills and experience and knowledge you will need are:

Ability:

• Experience and understanding of a range of user centred service design and delivery practices.
• The ability to understand what problem your team is trying to solve, and align user research activities to inform decision making and action.
• Experience and understanding of a range of user research methods, when to use those methods and how to apply them correctly.
• A good understanding of the diversity of users of government services, and the ability to include many kinds of users in appropriate research activities.
• Experience of working with colleagues to plan and do continuous user research in a multidisciplinary team.
• Experience of involving your team in research activities, and in the analysis and synthesis.
• A good understanding of the social and technological context for government services, and the ability to align user research activities to help their team understand changing user behaviour.
• An understanding of agile approaches and experience of working in agile teams.
• Ability to champion accessibility and inclusion, consider the impact of new technologies and ensure that designs meet accessibility, legal and security requirements.
• Able to use evidence to challenge assumptions, negotiate with product owners and rationalise design decisions based on user research.

Experience:

• Proven experience of gathering user requirements for web-based services.
• Proven experience of designing, facilitating and analysing a wide range of qualitative and quantitative user research methods.
• Demonstrable knowledge, experience in and passion for user centred design practices for web, service and software development.

Technical:

• Proven experience using Azure Devops.
• User journey mapping using tools such as Visio.
• Working knowledge of GDS Service Design Standards.

Behaviours

We'll assess you against these behaviours during the selection process:

• Changing and Improving
• Seeing the Big Picture
• Managing a Quality Service
• Delivering at Pace

Benefits

Alongside your salary of £35,384, Charity Commission contributes £10,250 towards you being a member of the Civil Service Defined Benefit Pension scheme. Find out what benefits a Civil Service Pension provides (opens in a new window).

This is your chance to make a contribution that really matters and to make an impact in an organisation where your voice will be heard and your hard work noticed.

Watch this short video to find out more about us. short video

We operate a flexible hybrid working policy where office attendance is combined with homeworking days dependent on role and corporate requirements.

We recognise everyone as an individual, accepting people for who they are and treating everyone fairly. We welcome the unique contribution diverse applicants bring from all backgrounds and we aim to have a workforce that represents the wider society that we serve. We champion inclusion and wellbeing, aiming to create a workplace where everyone feels valued and has a sense of belonging.

We do not discriminate on the basis of culture, ethnicity, race, nationality or national origin, age, sex, gender identity or expression, religion or belief, disability status, sexual orientation, educational or social background or any other factor.

We offer access to the highly competitive Civil Service Pension Scheme (employer contributions of 28.97%), far more than in the private sector, and a flexible, family-friendly environment. Additionally, you can look forward to other great benefits via our ‘Perkbox’ and ‘Edenred’ schemes. These include everything from an interest-free season ticket loan, tenancy deposit loan scheme and bicycle loan (after two months) to discounts on gym membership, cinema tickets and restaurants. Please see the attached Charity Commission benefits document.

A minimum of 25 days of paid annual leave, increasing by one day per year up to a maximum of 30 days per year. You have the opportunity to purchase up to an additional 5 days annual leave (pro rata) per year, requests must be submitted in the February of that year.

The Charity Commission’s operational ambition is to realise the Commission’s values of being an expert regulator that is fair, balanced, and independent, which works in a way that is supportive, collaborative, and innovative to achieve our ambitions. We want to develop our capability to regulate charities to realise this goal and meet our statutory and public duties to ensure that charity in England and Wales can deliver maximum benefit to society in a way that upholds its reputation in the eyes of the public.

Work at the Charity Commission and you’ll make a difference e