Interaction Designer Industrial Placement 2026 - Met Office - AO/EO

Exeter, South West England, EX1 3PB

The Met Office is delighted to open our advertising for Industrial Placements 2026.

This is an exciting opportunity to join the Met Office on a 12-month Year in Industry placement, commencing at the start of July 2026, developing your skills and knowledge and ensuring you gain the most value possible from your experience with us.

You will have the opportunity to network with our cohort of Industrial Placements all over the Met Office and understand what career opportunities are on offer at the Met Office after you graduate.

We're looking for a Interaction Designer Industrial Placement 2026 to help us make a difference to our planet.

As our Interaction Designer Industrial Placement 2026, the job may be suitable for hybrid working, which is where an employee works part of the week in the office and part of the week from home. This is a voluntary, non-contractual arrangement and the location advertised will be your contractual place of work. As an Industrial Placement, we would expect you to attend the office once a week as a minimum.

Our opportunity is full time, 37 hours per week. Our people are at the heart of what we do and we'll do our best to agree a working pattern that works for everyone.

World changing work

From science to technology, from meteorology to management, and from planning to communication, our expertise helps us stand out as the authority on weather accuracy and climate prediction. We help individuals, industries and government to make better decisions to stay safe and thrive. This is the Met Office. This is who we are.

• We're a force for good - focusing on our environmental and social impact
• We're experts by nature - always learning and developing to do things better
• We live and breathe it - putting our purpose at the heart of decision-making
• We're better together - understanding partnerships and inclusivity make us greater
• We keep evolving - pushing boundaries to make tomorrow better for our customers

Your world of expertise

Our Industrial Placement scheme offers ambitious and capable undergraduates the opportunity to gain valuable experience working alongside diverse and highly skilled experts in their field. You'll be working on projects that really matter and will make a difference.

The Met Office purpose is to help people stay safe and thrive. To achieve this, we need to understand the people we serve and their needs. The user-centred design team at the Met Office includes user researchers, interaction designers, content designers, service designers and accessibility specialists, working across different areas of the business to help solve real world problems by putting the user at the heart of Met Office products and services.

The Industrial Placement for interaction design will work closely with the interaction designers and service designers in the team to provide support ensuring that our products and services meet the needs of users. They will support with discovering the best way to let users interact with our products, identifying user issues and generating multiple solutions to a problem.

They will be involved in activities to enable our user-centred design team, including maintaining design systems and guidance documentation, providing support with user recruitment and testing, and advocating user-centred design across the business.

Your key duties

The Interaction Design Industrial Placement will:

• provide support for user-centred design teams including user recruitment, note taking, documenting design decisions, maintaining design systems and guidance documentation
• be supported to work collaboratively with teams, understanding the importance of team dynamics, collaboration and feedback
• understand the importance of using data and evidence to make design decisions and use this information to collaboratively come up with solutions to problems
• recommend design decisions and be able to describe the reasoning behind them• follow direction to create prototypes to demonstrate and test potential solutions
• work in an open-minded and iterative way
• follow the Government Digital Service Standards and user-centred design best practice guidelines to ensure solutions are focused on user needs
• communicate effectively with technical and non-technical colleagues, supporting multidisciplinary discussions
• be an advocate for the UCD team within the Met Office and be able to explain why interaction design and user-centred design is important
• be part of the UCD community of practice and champion user-centred design

Essential Criteria, skills and experience:

1. Lead Criteria: Awareness of prototyping. You can explain what prototyping is, and why and when to use it and are passionate about putting this into practice. Experience using design software (such as Figma.)
2. Evidence-based design: You are passionate about creating designs for digital products and understand the value of using evidence to inform design decisions.
3. Agile thinking. You understand the benefits of agile working and the different roles in a multidisciplinary team. You are aligned with the value 'we keep evolving' and are willing to iterate your work.
4. User focus and advocacy. You can explain how user-centred practices can be used to build products that 'keep evolving' to changing user behaviour and needs. You are willing to champion a user-focused approach with your colleagues.
5. Better together. You are able to communicate effectively with stakeholders and team members and present design decisions and ideas. You can be an active member and advocate of the user-centred design community.
6. Studying in digital design or similar.

The panel may perform a preliminary sift of the lead criteria as indicated above.