At Sainsbury’s we believe that the customer should be at the heart of everything we do. Our vision is to create the easiest, most enjoyable experiences that better serve our customers’ ever-changing needs. We work across a range of services, products, touchpoints and tools to deliver distinctive, integrated, and consistent experiences for our customers and colleagues across Sainsbury’s Group (which includes Sainsbury’s Food, Argos, Bank, Nectar, Tu and Habitat).

We drive brilliant experiences across all our brands in-store and online, operating in agile teams and squads, working seamlessly with teams right across the business to make the most of the exceptional knowledge, insight and talent we have.

The role:

You'll be working on Sainsbury’s products within our customer in-store team, which are mostly focused on checkouts, our biggest customer touch point in the organisation. We take 1.2 billion transactions from our customers each year, which gives you an idea of the scale and complexity of the space you’ll be working in.

You’ll get to work on things like our award-winning Smartshop app (Scan as you shop technology), Self-Checkouts, Pick and go (just-walk-out technology) and Argos Pay@browse (Argos self-checkout) and any other digital touch point in-store.

In your product team, you'll lead the research, design and testing of new ideas. You'll visit our stores to meet our customers and colleagues. You'll observe and interview them to experience what they do first-hand.

Your aim will be to understand them and the problems they face. This is challenging because the problems are complex and solving a problem could have a knock-on effect elsewhere. That's why you'll learn the wider context of how our stores and business works. You'll do this working with people from across the group, who will all have different knowledge, perspectives and opinions.

The changes you make will impact millions of customers in one of the UK's largest retailers.

What you'll do:

• Research customer needs through observation and interviews
• Organise and conduct in-store and remote research
• Interact with stakeholders from across the group to share insights and ideas
• Design and test concepts and solutions
• Collaborate with diverse teams from different disciplines
• Champion inclusive design principles in your work and throughout the team
• Work within agile teams to get your solutions in to the hands of our customers

What we're looking for:

This is an entry level / junior role, so we’re not expecting you to have lots of industry experience as a UX or Product Designer. However, we do expect you to have some relevant or transferable work experience and/or some formal training. You should be able to demonstrate knowledge and learning in these areas with some case studies of your work and thinking. Most of all we’re looking for someone who is open, curious and eager to learn.

Skills we're looking for:

• Be able to support user research – e.g. supporting card sorting exercises writing interview scripts, building prototypes (paper or clickable) conducting interviews and trialling new concepts with customers
• Proficiency in latest design tools – e.g. Figma, Miro
• Awareness of what it means to design inclusively
• Highly motivated, with excellent communication skills and a can-do attitude
• Adaptable to changing priorities, complexity, and unknowns
• Confidence challenging your peers and stakeholders
• Taking the initiative and driving change
• Tailoring your approach for different audiences

Tips and guidance on what we look for in portfolios: https://medium.com/p/1ace9c422d2

Qualifications

We are committed to being a truly inclusive retailer, so you’ll be welcomed whoever you are and wherever you work. Around here, there’s always the chance to try something new - whether that’s as part of an evolving team or somewhere else across the business - and we take development seriously and promise to support you. We also recognise and celebrate colleagues when they go the extra mile and, where possible, offer flexible working. When you join our team, we’ll also offer you an amazing range of benefits. Here are some of them:

Starting off with colleague discount, you'll be able to get 10% off at Sainsbury's, Argos, TU and Habitat after 4 weeks. This increases to 15% off at Sainsbury’s every Friday and Saturday and 15% off at Argos every pay day. We've also got you covered for your future with our pensions scheme and life cover. You'll also be able to share in our success as you may be eligible for a performance-related bonus of up to 5% of salary, depending on how we perform.

Your wellbeing is important to us too. You'll receive an annual holiday allowance, and you can buy additional holiday. We also offer other benefits that will help your money go further such as season ticket loans, cycle to work scheme, health cash plans, pay advance (where you can access some of your pay before pay day) as well access to a great range of discounts from hundreds of other retailers. And if you ever need it there is also an employee assistance programme.

Moments that matter are as important to us as they are to you which is why we give up to 26 weeks’ pay for maternity or adoption leave and up to 4 weeks’ pay for paternity leave.

Please see www.sainsburys.jobs for a range of our benefits (note, length of service and eligibility criteria may apply).

Please note, due to the volume of applications we receive, our roles may close early.

Responsibilities

We’d all like amazing work to do, and real work-life balance. That’s waiting for you at Sainsbury’s. Think about the scale it takes for us to feed the nation. The level of data, transactions and variety it involves. Then you’ll realise that ours is a modern software engineering environment because it has to be. We’ve made serious investment into a Tech Academy and into setting standards and principles. We iterate, learn, experiment and push ways of working such as Agile, Scrum and XP. So you can look forward to awesome opportunities in everything from AI to reusable tech.