User Researcher

Join our Customer Experience Capability

Sheffield City Council is building its Customer Experience Capability, a team focused on improving how residents experience council services and how colleagues are supported to deliver them.

The team brings together customer journeys, insight, workforce development, equalities, engagement, and communications. Its purpose is to help the Council work in a more joined-up, customer-focused way, using feedback, data, digital tools, and practical improvement methods to make services easier to access and better to use.

These roles are an opportunity to help shape a growing capability, work across services, and make a practical difference to how Sheffield residents experience the Council.

Can you help us better understand the experiences, needs, and challenges of people who use council services?

We are looking for a User Researcher to join our Customer Journeys team and provide specialist user research expertise across Sheffield City Council.

This role will help us understand how residents, communities, customers, and colleagues experience council services. Through research, engagement, testing, and insight gathering, you will help shape improvements that make services more accessible, inclusive, and effective.

Working as part of a multidisciplinary team, you will support discovery, service design, testing, and continuous improvement activity across a range of council services. You will help ensure decisions are informed by evidence and real user needs rather than assumptions.

In this role, you will:

• Plan and deliver user research across customer journeys and services
• Use interviews, surveys, observation, usability testing, focus groups, and other research methods to gather insight
• Identify customer needs, barriers, behaviours, and opportunities for improvement
• Analyse and communicate research findings in a clear and practical way
• Support journey mapping, service design, and improvement activity
• Ensure research is accessible, inclusive, ethical, and evidence-led
• Work with services, communities, and colleagues to bring a wide range of voices into improvement work

We are looking for someone who:

• Has experience planning and delivering research, engagement, insight, or related activities
• Can analyse information and identify meaningful themes and recommendations
• Is skilled at communicating findings clearly and confidently
• Understands the importance of accessibility, inclusion, and digital inclusion
• Can build positive relationships with customers, colleagues, and stakeholders
• Is curious, analytical, and willing to challenge assumptions using evidence
• Is passionate about improving public services and customer experience

This is a great opportunity to help shape how Sheffield City Council understands and responds to the experiences of residents, ensuring services are designed around real user needs and deliver better outcomes for communities across the city.

Contact: katie.mullen@sheffield.gov.uk

We are investing in our workforce and are promoting opportunities to our under-represented groups. We value equality, diversity and inclusion and are focused on increasing the diversity of our workforce, particularly the number of Black, Asian, Minority Ethnic, Disabled and LGBTQ+ people, so that our teams reflect the communities in the city we serve. We are also supporting staff with unpaid caring responsibilities to work flexibly.

It is a great time to join us and we welcome your application.

Under the Guaranteed Interview scheme, applicants who are disabled, care leavers, or armed forces veterans will be guaranteed an interview if they meet the essential criteria and indicate their eligibility on the application form. Sometimes, if lots of people apply, we might not be able to interview everyone who qualifies for the Guarantee. In these cases, we’ll interview the candidates who best meet the essential criteria for the job.

Full-time employees work 37 hours for 52 weeks of the year and we offer a generous holiday entitlement. We are open to discussions about a wide range of flexible working opportunities which benefit you and the Council, including reduced hour contracts, working part time or as a job share.

If you are appointed to this role, your starting salary will be at the bottom of the grade. If you provide payslip evidence that your basic pay is greater than the bottom of the grade, we will consider starting you at the point of minimum advantage within the grade.

Equality of pay is extremely important to us. All roles at Sheffield City Council are going through an evaluation process which may result in changes to some pay arrangements from 2026. Find out more on our Sheff news page.

We are committed to safeguarding and promoting the welfare of all individuals, ensuring a safe and supportive environment for everyone and where appropriate to the role the successful applicant will be required to undertake relevant safeguarding checks.