INTRODUCTION

Maryland Family and Medical Leave Insurance (FAMLI) makes sure all workers in Maryland have paid time off for medical and family reasons. FAMLI is a social insurance system covering 2.6 million workers and 180,000 employers, delivered as a digitally native, public-facing service. We’re in the early stages of building something as big and as far-reaching as unemployment insurance or a new health department.
Our Digital Services team brings a modern and cross-disciplinary approach to creating, launching, and continuously improving the digital services powering paid leave in Maryland. The team is responsible for providing human-centered experiences to workers who need to take paid leave, employers who need to provide paid leave, and FAMLI staff who process claims and provide direct support to the public. This a rare chance to build a digital service from the ground up for the people of Maryland and a career-defining civic tech opportunity.
As a Senior Designer on the Digital Services team, you’ll utilize human-centered design, care, and curiosity to establish brand new services for Marylanders. With a balance between foundational strategy and iterative service delivery, you’ll be both a leader and an individual contributor as you work on cross-disciplinary teams to design scalable experiences that are usable and trustworthy. You should be comfortable working in a startup environment where you think independently and operate with a high degree of autonomy. We’re looking for self-starters who are skilled at driving projects forward while communicating and collaborating closely on teams.
This role is remote, but you’ll often commute to the FAMLI office in downtown Baltimore and throughout Maryland to conduct in-person user research.

MINIMUM QUALIFICATIONS

Experience:

• 6 years of experience in human-centered design
• At least 1-2 years of experience working on service delivery for government services
• Experience as a leader and an individual contributor on a cross-disciplinary service delivery team
• Experience building foundational human-centered design operations to enable service delivery
• Experience conducting user research in public sector settings

DESIRED OR PREFERRED QUALIFICATIONS

We’re hiring a team of multiple Senior Designers. Together the team will utilize skillsets in user research, interaction/visual design, content design, and service design, but individual candidates aren’t expected to be experts in all areas of human-centered design.

We prefer all candidates to have:

• Experience in human-centered design for government benefit programs
• The ability to “shift left” and implement accessibility tactics throughout the design process

• Awareness of trauma-informed practicesA mindset and drive for continuous learning

• We’d also like candidates to have experience in some of these areas:

User research

• Building research practices from the ground up for government services, including establishing strategies for compensation, consent, care plans for researchers, and tracking findings in a repository
• Conducting research with people with disabilities
• Conducting research with native Spanish speakers

Interaction/visual design

• Designing with and expanding the U.S. Web Design System
• Managing strategies to establish and grow a design system alongside front-end engineers; direct front-end engineering experience is a plus

• Creating, curating, and using design tokens in a design systemProficiency in using Figma to manage a large design system

SPECIAL REQUIREMENTS

All candidates are subject to a background check against files maintained by the Division of Unemployment Insurance (Labor/DUI) to determine whether any monies are owed to Labor/DUI as a result of unemployment insurance overpayment/fraud. Any unpaid debt may have an impact on whether or not a candidate is offered employment.

MAIN PURPOSE OF JOB

The Senior Designer reports to the Director of Experience Design within the Division of Family and Medical Leave Insurance (FAMLI), which is part of the Maryland Department of Labor. As a critical expert in human-centered design, you’ll lead the implementation of FAMLI’s digital experiences for employers, medical providers, workers applying for benefits, and FAMLI staff (e.g., Customer Care agents and Claim adjudicators).
Day-to-day you’ll collaborate with cross-disciplinary product development teams made up of FAMLI staff and vendors and subject matter experts in policy, communications, public engagement, and operations.
This role utilizes experience in user experience, design systems, content design, user research, service design, and accessibility to ensure FAMLI delivers services effectively. You’ll lead iterative design processes through problem scoping, co-creation workshops, qualitative research and discovery, data analysis, ideation, prototyping, service blueprinting, and user research with the general public and FAMLI staff.

POSITION DUTIES

Duties of this position include, but are not limited to:

• Leads the foundational definition and refinement of how FAMLI’s services works based on policy, program and user needs.
• Applies specialized technical expertise in content design, service design, solution that ensure our experiences are usable by everyone, especially people with disabilities and people who need to navigate our services in languages other than English.
• Sets direction and builds strategies that ensure the experiences we deliver are consistent, informed by user research and industry best practices, scalable, and maintainable. Provides vendor oversight to ensure strategies and standards are met.
• Develops and maintains design and research standards, operations, and processes for FAMLI that enable the delivery of effective human-centered experiences.
• Reviews and provides actionable feedback on work developed by vendors and other FAMLI staff, including content, services design documentation, and research plans and findings.
• Develops and maintains templates and documentation that support and enable the delivery of usable experiences and consistent, repeatable processes. This may include service blueprints, journey naps, a user research repository, content guidelines, content models, human-centered design training, design specifications, artifacts that communicate information architecture, and user research plans, scripts, and synthesis.
• Analyzes the risks and opportunities for digital experience solutions and develops recommendations based on program priorities, user needs, and level of effort.
• Plans and executes co-creation workshops with cross-disciplinary teams to determine the most viable solutions to solve problems.
• Builds a user research practice within FAMLI from the ground up to ensure FAMLI has processes that are trauma-informed and prioritize care for both research participants and research practitioners.
• Utilizes prototyping and other strategies to test solutions and iterate before implementing and scaling.