Design exercise solutions that land offers
By: Dan Shilov
Tags: UX, UX Design, Design Exercise, Interaction Design, Product Design

Design exercise solutions that land offers

You’ve passed the phone screen and have been asked to do the take home design exercise. What’s next? In addition to the approach, I’ll share my process with an in-depth example that landed me a great offer at a major consulting company. I’m also including lessons learned from failures.

Why a take home design exercise?

Companies use design exercises to assess your:

Process in how you approach and solve ambiguous problems, Craft skills and how fast you can deliver high quality work, Divergent thinking — generating different ideas quickly, Prioritization—converging on critical concepts that lead to impact

Design exercises have faults built-in: they’re artificial, take a long time to complete, require high effort, to name a few. However, I believe you can play to your strengths by highlighting your potential.

Maybe your current job didn’t offer you the right environment to prove yourself. Or you think your portfolio isn’t an accurate representation of what you can do now. It happens. Now’s your chance to show off those skills.

Nine principles for a successful design exercise

There are no shortcuts but you can increase your chances by:

Practicing — if you’ve never done a design exercise, practice by finding a problem you’re interested in. Give yourself a deadline, write a prompt, do it in the allotted time, and give yourself an objective evaluation.

Understanding context and questions — get to know the constraints and how your work will be evaluated.

Going above and beyond — after understanding the baseline requirements, see how you can exceed expectations. As Paul Graham says,

The best protection is always working on hard problems

Letting the narrative guide your presentation — it’s not about the technology or the process—it’s about how all the work you’ve done helps the customer lead a better life.

Showing and curating process — generate lots of ideas and be deliberate in what you focus on. If it doesn’t make your narrative stronger — leave it.

Talking to customers —actually talk to people. Yes this will be a biased, convenience sample but having rough customer feedback is better than none at all. Scrappiness is a virtue.

Synthesizing findings — show the meaning you’ve extracted from disparate data sources to frame the problem accurately.

Treating it like work — imagine you’re already working at this company, how would you approach the challenge?

Delighting the client — when your foundation is solid can you add a cherry on top that leaves interviewers in awe? From Ueno,

When someone asks you for a coffee, bring the best one you can, but always add a piece of chocolate.

Start by understanding context

Ok, you have your design exercise prompt. What should you do first? Since this is a high-stakes project it’s important to get context upfront to save time executing on the right direction:

What is the final deliverable?

What are they looking for? Is this a mobile app, a sitemap, a research brief or a desktop app? Are they looking for you to show your skills in interaction design, information architecture, research, visual design? This should be clear from the prompt.

What’s unclear?

Even with clear prompts you’re still bound to have questions. That’s a good sign. Generate a list, reread the prompt and think how the answers can help you move faster when you’re heads down on challenge.

How collaborative do they want to be?

Interviewers might be willing or expect to provide feedback during the course of your work. You should both be on the same page as to how often you can reach out, to who, what feedback you should get and when.

When is your deliverable due?

Structure the deadline to your advantage. When I had a lull in work it was easy for me to focus intensely on the design exercise to get it done. Other times I’ve taken a day off or pushed back on the start date of the exercise so I could work on it over the weekend.

What are your options?

Design exercises are time intensive—some companies offer the choice of a whiteboard collaboration instead. I took this option when I was deep in two exercises already. This saved me time, deliver high quality work for the other two and the interviewers felt they got everything that they needed from the whiteboard. So consider exploring your options here.

How will you present your work?

Usually at the end of the design exercise you’ll present at their office. If possible, try to get a sense of what you’ll be working with: their room set up, monitor, seating, etc. It’s always good to know your context and be prepared with backup in case their tech fails.

Now let’s take a look at how you can implement these in practice.