UX/UI Designer (Public Sector)
Day rate: £500 - £550 (potentially some wiggle room)
Location: Ideally North of England, but open to anywhere as long as you're ok travelling to site in Manchester, Leeds or Midlands 2 - 4 day a month
Engagement type: Outside IR35
Start date: Immediate
Need to be eligible for SC Clearance
We're looking for experienced UX/UI designers to join a specialist technology consultancy working on high-impact digital services. These are contract roles with immediate starts, working across public sector programmes with the opportunity to take on private sector work as your engagement evolves.
The work
You'll be embedded in delivery teams working on complex public sector digital services, the kind of work where good design genuinely changes outcomes for the people using it. You'll work alongside content designers, user researchers, and service designers to shape services from discovery through to live.
UX/UI design here means more than wireframes and visuals. You'll be making decisions about user flows, interaction patterns, and interface design that hold up under scrutiny, translating complex policy and process into services that are simple, accessible, and easy to use. You'll design and iterate through discovery, alpha, beta and live, running rapid prototyping and testing cycles, and working to GDS service standards and design principles throughout. You'll engage directly with stakeholders and advocate for users in environments where legacy systems and institutional constraints can be hard to shift.
The consultancy works across both public and private sector, so while immediate projects are in government and public services, there is scope for the right person to work across a broader portfolio over time.
What we're looking for
- Deep experience designing for government or other highly regulated public sector services
- Strong grasp of GDS design principles and the Service Standard
- A track record of working through the full assessment lifecycle, including discovery, alpha, beta and live assessments
- Experience designing accessible, inclusive interfaces to WCAG standards
- Solid understanding of responsive and multi-channel design
- Confident navigating the GOV.UK Design System or similar pattern libraries, with a view on when and how to challenge and extend them based on evidence and research
- Skilled in Figma for prototyping and design handover
- Comfortable collaborating closely with researchers, content designers, and developers in agile delivery environments
- Familiarity with tools like Figma, Google Docs, GitHub, and design/prototyping libraries
- A view on how you're using AI tools in your practice
- The confidence to talk through the decisions behind your work, not just what you designed, but why, and what difference it made
Requirements
You must be eligible for Security Check (SC) clearance. Active clearance is not required, but you must be eligible. You should also be willing and able to travel to client sites a few times a month as the engagement requires.
How to apply
If this sounds like the right kind of work, we'd love to hear from you. Send us a note about your background and a few examples of what you've worked on recently. Shortlisted candidates will be invited to an initial conversation, followed by a skills interview where you'll be asked to walk through examples of your work.
At Inara Talent, we believe everyone deserves a fair chance to shine. We connect great people from all backgrounds with opportunities where they can thrive, making sure hiring is fair, inclusive, and truly diverse. No matter your race, gender, age, ability, or background, we focus on what really matters: your talent.